De profundis is a letter that Wilde wrote to his former friend Bosie while serving his sentence at Reading jail.
It's a long, beautiful and very sorrowful text where the author tries to explain the sequence of events that lead to his imprisonment, what his friend's responsibilities were and what mistakes he himself made (mostly out of weakness and kindness, in his opinion).
The author of this book is an American writer of Burmese descent. His grandfather was a colleague and close friend of the heroes of Burmese independence and the Secretary-general of the UN from 1962 to 1971. Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was a frequent guest at his family's house in New York, before the 1988 uprising.
Another book against traditional morals by F.W. Nietzsche. This means a book against traditional religions and philosophy, as they have put forward a supposedly "real" world, accessible through reason or faith, as opposed to the "false" world offered by the senses.
This is a mystification. Morals tend to inhibit passion in order to avoid all possible negative consequences. The mistake lies in trying to extirpate passions rather then spiritualize them. Morals should help human life by removing any obstacles to happiness and free expression of natural instincts. Yet, they do exactly the opposite: they oppose life, instincts and the senses.
The usual crowd sits in two rows:
football, curries and cheap beer
flood with good mood the atmosphere
and help all conversation flows.
A sudden force engulfs the scene
and in seconds every movement stops,
spoons are hanging in mid air,
all the faces turn as one.
Let's start by stating that this is not a book against Jesus Christ, meaning the historical person, the religious prophet or the revolutionary philosopher. This is definitely a very harsh criticism of Christianity, the Christian church and its founding fathers (the Apostles, Paul of Tarsus, the Popes, the priests), of its roots planted in a corrupt version of Judaism (corrupt when compared with the original form of it) and of the German Lutheran reformation.
One might not agree with Nietzsche's conclusions, judgments, opinions and some creative historical interpretations, which I do find extremely fascinating and often very convincing, at least much more convincing than most of the orthodox ones - the idea that the Greco-Roman tradition was bled by Christianity from inside (as opposed to destroyed by a natural catastrophe or a military invasion), that the middle age crusades did contribute to obliterate the advanced Moorish civilization in Spain and that the German Lutheran reformation did a similar thing to the Italian Renaissance cultural-revolutionary movement, is a brilliant historical intuition.
A stroll down the promenade
by St. Julian's bay,
from Spinola to Balluta
on a warm autumn day.
The sky is clear,
the wind is strong,
people in swimsuits
read books or doze off.
At Paradise Exiles,
a hip bar by the sea,
locals and foreigners
have snacks and cold drinks.
A sailor from here,
tattoos on dark skin,
with longing reveals,
while sipping beers,
that in two or three weeks
high waves and big rain
will gradually sweep
the magic away.
What might at first seem a sequence
of conversations of a mad voice
with singular, plural, material
and imagined listeners,
suddenly becomes clear
and beautiful as well,
when you finally understand
the underlining pattern.
The book starts when spring begins
and ends when summer finishes.
