Wilde×Socrates

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Oscar Wilde and Socrates, on On a person they loved but could not keep.
2. 00:08
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I must confess, Socrates, I find the topic rather like being asked to discuss one's favorite scar. One has it, certainly. One might even finger it from time to time in moments of weakness. But to display it on public radio seems almost vulgar.
3. 00:21
   Socratesshare moment

   And yet you've already begun displaying it, haven't you? Tell me, Oscar, when you say the topic is vulgar, do you mean the pain is too private to speak of, or that speaking of it might reveal something true about yourself?
4. 00:37
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How perfectly Socratic. I make an observation about taste and you immediately turn it into an inquisition of the soul. Very well. I speak, of course, of Lord Alfred Douglas. Bosie. Though to say I 'could not keep' him makes it sound as though he were a pocket watch I misplaced, rather than a beautiful, terrible boy who destroyed me.
5. 00:54
   Socratesshare moment

   Destroyed you? But you're the one who chose to pursue him, aren't you? You wrote the letters, attended the trials, refused exile when it was offered. So which is the truth—did he destroy you, or did you destroy yourself?
6. 01:11
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Must it be one or the other? Life is rarely so obliging as philosophy, my dear Socrates. He was a golden poison, and I drank knowingly. The pleasure and the punishment were rather inseparable, like a marriage or a sonnet.
7. 01:22
   Socratesshare moment

   Then you're saying you loved the very thing that harmed you. Interesting. But tell me, when you say you loved him, what exactly do you mean by love? Was it his beauty you loved, or his youth, or perhaps the danger itself?
8. 01:39
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I loved his impossibility. He was everything I wasn't permitted to have, which naturally made him irresistible. Though I suspect you're about to tell me that isn't love at all, that it's merely appetite or vanity dressed up in velvet.
9. 01:51
   Socratesshare moment

   I won't tell you anything, Oscar. I'm simply asking. Can one truly love what one is not permitted to have? Or is that merely desire intensified by prohibition, the way a child wants most desperately whatever toy is placed on the highest shelf?
10. 02:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, but desire is the highest shelf, Socrates. Everything else is merely furniture arrangement. Besides, you evade the question yourself. Surely you had someone. Some beloved companion you couldn't keep, even though you spent your entire life talking about love as if you'd invented it.
11. 02:24
    Socratesshare moment

    I had Alcibiades. Though to say I 'had' him would be generous. He pursued me rather spectacularly, as you may know—came to my house, tried to seduce me, declared himself madly in love. Quite the beautiful young man, rather like your Bosie, I suspect.
12. 02:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And you refused him? Good God, why? Don't tell me you were being virtuous. I've read Plato. Half of your dialogues read like philosophical foreplay.
13. 02:50
    Socratesshare moment

    I didn't refuse his company, only his misunderstanding. He wanted my body, but what I wanted was his soul. He thought love meant possession, consumption. I thought it meant transformation. So we talked through the night, and in the morning he was furious with me.
14. 03:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I can't imagine why. You sound absolutely delightful. Here's a beautiful boy offering himself to you and you give him a lecture instead. That's not love, Socrates, that's pedagogy.
15. 03:19
    Socratesshare moment

    Is it? But what did you give Bosie, Oscar? Wit, dinners, legal ruin? Did you make him better, or did you simply confirm him in his worst impulses because you found them charming?
16. 03:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That's rather cruel, even for you. I gave him everything I had. My reputation, my freedom, my health. I went to prison rather than abandon him. What more spectacular proof of love could possibly exist?
17. 03:43
    Socratesshare moment

    Proof to whom? To him, or to yourself? Because from what you've told me, he didn't ask you to go to prison. He barely visited you there. So whose love was being proven, and who was meant to witness it?
18. 04:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You're suggesting I performed my own martyrdom. How dare you. How absolutely, precisely dare you.
19. 04:05
    Socratesshare moment

    I'm not suggesting anything, I'm asking. Did you love Bosie himself, or did you love being the kind of man who would sacrifice everything for love? There's a difference, surely.
20. 04:18
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    If there is, it's one you're uniquely qualified to make, having drunk hemlock rather than admit you might occasionally be wrong. Don't speak to me of performance, Socrates. Your entire death was theater.
21. 04:29
    Socratesshare moment

    Perhaps it was. But I knew my audience—Athens, posterity, philosophy itself. Tell me, who was your audience when you chose Bosie over prudence?
22. 04:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Myself. Art. The future. Everyone who would ever be told they must not love whom they love. I was writing in my own blood the story that others would need to read.
23. 04:50
    Socratesshare moment

    So you did know you were performing. And Bosie—was he your co-star or merely your prop?
24. 04:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Stop it. Just stop. He was a real person, whom I really loved, and who really hurt me. You can't reduce that to some philosophical exercise about the nature of love and self-deception.
25. 05:08
    Socratesshare moment

    Can't I? But Oscar, you've already told me he was impossible, that he destroyed you, that loving him was like drinking poison. These are your words, not mine. I'm simply asking you to examine them.
26. 05:22
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And what of Alcibiades, then? Your beautiful boy who offered himself and got a philosophy lesson. He went on to betray Athens, you know. Spectacularly. Did your soul-improving conversation do him any good?
27. 05:33
    Socratesshare moment

    Probably not. He wanted someone to confirm his beauty, to tell him he was already perfect. I couldn't give him that lie. So he found others who would, and yes, they ruined him more thoroughly than I ever could have.
28. 05:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But you couldn't keep him.
29. 05:50
    Socratesshare moment

    No.
30. 05:51
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Because you wouldn't give him what he wanted.
31. 05:53
    Socratesshare moment

    Because what he wanted would have destroyed what he could become. Is that love, do you think? Giving someone what they want, even when you know it will harm them?
32. 06:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I think love is the catastrophic privilege of being destroyed by someone and calling it a gift. I think it's knowing perfectly well you're walking into disaster and going anyway because the alternative is to be safe and small and dead inside.
33. 06:17
    Socratesshare moment

    Then you loved your own destruction more than you loved Bosie.
34. 06:21
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perhaps. Or perhaps I loved him enough to let him be the instrument of it. There's a generosity in that, don't you think? Allowing someone the power to ruin you completely?
35. 06:29
    Socratesshare moment

    Or a cowardice. Easier to blame love for your choices than to admit you chose badly.
36. 06:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And you chose better, I suppose? Watching your beautiful Alcibiades walk away rather than compromise your precious principles? How did that feel, Socrates, being right and being alone?
37. 06:45
    Socratesshare moment

    I wasn't alone. I had students, friends, my wife—though I grant you none of them were Alcibiades. But tell me honestly, did you ever have Bosie? Really have him, I mean, not as an idea or a symbol but as a person?
38. 07:02
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I don't know. There were moments. A particular afternoon in Goring. A weekend in Worthing. Times when we were simply two people being happy, before everything became symbolic and doomed. But perhaps those moments were never as real as I remember them.
39. 07:16
    Socratesshare moment

    Or perhaps they were the only real moments, and everything else—the scandal, the sacrifice, the poetry of suffering—was the performance you built around them.
40. 07:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    God, you're exhausting. Do you know that? This is precisely why no one likes philosophers. We're discussing love and loss and you're dismantling it like it's some logical puzzle to be solved.
41. 07:38
    Socratesshare moment

    But isn't it? A puzzle, I mean. You loved someone you couldn't keep. I loved someone I wouldn't keep. Both of us are here, decades or centuries later, still thinking about them. What does that tell us?
42. 07:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That we're fools? That love is impossible? That beauty is always fatal? I don't know, Socrates. What does it tell you?
43. 08:00
    Socratesshare moment

    That we don't actually know what love is. We use the word constantly, build our lives around it, die for it. But we can't define it, can't possess it, can't even be certain we've experienced it. Rather like truth, now that I think about it.
44. 08:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How perfectly unsatisfying. I pour out my heart about Bosie and your conclusion is epistemological uncertainty. This is what comes of talking to dead philosophers.
45. 08:26
    Socratesshare moment

    And yet you're still talking. Why is that, do you think?
46. 08:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Because talking about him is the only way I still have him, I suppose. Even if it hurts. Even if you insist on making it hurt more with your infernal questions. He's alive while we speak of him. The moment we stop, he's just a name in history books next to mine.
47. 08:43
    Socratesshare moment

    Then perhaps that's what it means to love someone you cannot keep. Not to possess them in life, but to carry them in speech. To keep them alive in the only way immortality permits—through conversation.
48. 08:56
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Socrates, was that almost a straight answer? Have I corrupted you?
49. 08:59
    Socratesshare moment

    Not an answer, Oscar. Just another question wearing a better coat. After all, is that what we're both doing here? Keeping our beloveds alive by refusing to stop talking about them?
50. 09:12
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    If it is, it's the kindest thing you've said all evening. Though I still maintain you should have slept with Alcibiades. Some opportunities are too beautiful to waste on principle.
51. 09:21
    Socratesshare moment

    And some principles are too important to waste on beauty. But then, we've always disagreed about which matters more, haven't we?
52. 09:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Always. Though I notice we're both here, dead and still arguing, while beauty and principle both turned to dust. Perhaps neither of us was right.
53. 09:38
    Socratesshare moment

    Or perhaps being right was never the point. Perhaps the point was loving them at all, keeping them or not.
54. 09:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Dear God, Socrates. Was that wisdom or sentiment? I genuinely can't tell.
55. 09:51
    Socratesshare moment

    Neither can I. Shall we call it love and be done with it?
56. 09:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Let's. Though I suspect we'll both regret the definition by morning.