Dear Oscar,

I know that your incarceration will have been a very low point in your life, but it has crossed my mind that actually it served you well in unexpected ways. You did after all write the epic letter to Bosie, ‘De Profundis’, a great work which reverberates its truths through history, and you were inspired to compose the poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, which similarly now holds an enviable position within the canon of world literature.

What is more, in the depths of such deprivation, you were thrown back on to yourself alone, with none of the stimuli of the world in which you had so eagerly moved, none of the distractions, the pretences, the dreamy romanticism. It is no doubt true to say that I have no idea of what it must have been like, and never can have, because such regimes are lost to us, altered through time, different in the ways they take their effect and have their impact. The world in so many ways is seemingly so different. Yet I cannot help thinking such a level of loss, of enforced denial, that the inability to sate the excessive appetites of success and celebrity, may in turn lead to some appreciation of what we all truly have, which is very little, which is only ourselves. I know that public censure must have been extremely hard to bear, but to recognise the nobility of the self even in the face of castigation, to see that the two lungs will breathe, the heart will beat, the senses remain, must have offered some little solace. It is all just making me appreciative of the fact that I have all of these things and also my liberty (such as it is in our modern era).

I am increasingly aware that my possession of health and well-being are the most powerful tools that I have in navigating my way through a life which is not uncomplicated, not un-beset by daily issues, by problems great and small that arise from time to time, by expectations and disappointments, by dashed hopes and broken promises. Thinking of you, Oscar dear, leads me to acknowledge that the most basic of advantages that all of us possess, just the breath that flows, the blood that pumps, is enough; everything else is ‘icing on the cake’.

I have a part to play in maintaining my health, my mental stability, my feelings of ease, my joie de vivre. I feel in some sense that I have a duty to myself, that I must expect of myself not an unwavering recognition of my needs, but always the ability to pick myself up should I fall, to set myself back on a familiar path should I digress, to keep on taking steps forward. I, like the majority of the earth’s inhabitants, the overwhelming majority, perhaps even, in some sense, everyone, can transcend, remind, imagine, reach. I am presented with choices at every juncture, and I have the ability to make choices that are of help to me and my world. It is, in so many ways, a glorious thing to be thrown back upon one’s own resources, to have to manufacture for oneself the road map leading back to some sense of salvation, of preservation.

I am happy.

I can continue to be happy.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.