De Profundis

Opening of the book

Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen & Co. edition by David
Price, email [email protected].  Note that later editions
of De Profundis contained more material.  The most
complete editions are still in copyright in the U.S.A.
DE PROFUNDIS
. . . Suffering is one very long moment.  We cannot divide
it by seasons.  We can only record its moods, and
chronicle their return.  With us time itself does not
progress.  It revolves.  It seems to circle round one
centre of pain.  The paralysing immobility of a life every
circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable
pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray,
or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible
laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes
each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its
brother, seems to communicate itself to those external
forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless
change.  Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending
over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through
the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with
broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we
know nothing and 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
day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down
through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred
window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard.  It is
always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in
one’s heart.  And in the sphere of thought, no less than
in the sphere of time, motion is no more.  The thing that
you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily
forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me
again to-morrow.  Remember this, and you will be able to
understand a little of why I am writing, and in this

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