Dear Oscar,

I have a feeling in this modern era that I am more of a Bosie than an Oscar.  Over indulged and flighty, everything at my beck and call, able to pick and choose and reject and dismiss – to ‘like’ and, of course, to ‘un-like’.  Oh, I wish you had encountered the internet!  Where an ‘influencer’ can die and be mourned by millions, while many other millions never knew that such a person ever existed!

I have a feeling that you were actually very set in your ways, and that despite the reprimand of imprisonment, of public humiliation, of loss of career and income, you actually carried on as normal, selecting youthful companions across France and the other denizens you visited once you were in your retirement.  Very strange thing about retirement; you may stop one thing but you carry on doing all of the other things that have been the compulsions of living.  I do think there was an element of compulsion in your character, Oscar, because you seem to have had to keep on doing what you always had done, like some irresistible urge, some ongoing defiance in the face of censure and opprobrium, an obsession lived out in your own real time.  

Almost addictive.  

We think we know all about addiction in this twenty-first century, because we have invented drugs and formed habits that have become utterly all-consuming.  I think it is probably the case that much of the planet is now drug dependent, and where people think they are not, they only have to look to the ingredients of the foodstuffs that we are all forced to consume, to the levels of sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol that have become the staples of virtually the entire globe, to realise that we all keep on returning to the same substances, the same stimulants, to regulate not only our waking hours but our dreaming ones too.

None of it was unknown to you, Oscar, and I would hazard a guess that you indulged in various illicit substances throughout your lifetime.  After all, there may not have been the multiplicity of chemical concoctions that we have now at our disposal, but your Victorian age was notorious for gases and potions, acids and poisons, that were mind altering in their effects.  Even before your time!  Samuel Taylor Coleridge springs to mind, Kubla Khan, Xanadu, the ‘pleasure dome’ of heady intoxicants transporting the romantic mind.  I expect it has all been going on throughout the millennia, the ancient world with its nymphs and satyrs, its gods and demi-gods, the mysticisms of the Orient, water pipes, and hashish, and transcendental meditation, the yogis of the Indian subcontinent, the dream-time of Australia’s originary folk.  A part, it might be argued, of the human condition.

The problem, of course, is that such behaviours encourage a stepping away from the established norm, a re-evaluation of that established norm, and very often a subversion of its intent and its effect.  In collision with that other part of the human condition which seeks regularity, order, compliance, rules and proscribed regulation.  You know, we all know, all about all of that.  I wish you had not been made to suffer because of it;  as I wish those of today were not made to suffer because of it too.

Love to you,

Algernon B. Duffoure.