Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen & Co. edition by DavidPrice, . Note that later editions ofDe Profundis contained more material. The most completeeditions are still in copyright in the U.S.A.
. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannotdivide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, andchronicle their return. With us time itself does notprogress. It revolves. It seems to circle round onecentre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life everycircumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern,so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at leastfor prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula:this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the veryminutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself tothose external forces the very essence of whose existence isceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapersbending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading throughthe vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with brokenblossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothingand can know nothing.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the daymay be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through thethickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneathwhich one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilightin one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’sheart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in thesphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that youpersonally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, ishappening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of whyI am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .
A week later, I am transferred here. Three more monthsgo over and my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I lovedand honoured her. Her death was terrible to me; but I, oncea lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguishand my shame. She and my father had bequeathed me a namethey had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art,archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my owncountry, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced thatname eternally. I had made it a low by-word among lowpeople. I had dragged it through the very mire. I hadgiven it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to foolsthat they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What Isuffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paperto record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, ratherthan that I should hear the news from indifferent lips,travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England tobreak to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, soirremediable, a loss. Messages of sympathy reached me fromall who had still affection for me. Even people who had notknown me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into mylife, wrote to ask that some expression of their condolenceshould be conveyed to me. . . .
Three months go over. The calendar of my daily conductand labour that hangs on the outside of my cell door, with myname and sentence written upon it, tells me that it is May. . ..
Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain andcommon in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all createdthings. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world ofthought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible andexquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulousgold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot seeis in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when anyhand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again,though not in pain