It's Sunday in Crouch End (and most places, truth be told...). I'm feeling slightly unwell and have spent the day curled up rather decadently in bed with good coffee, a sour cherry and dark chocolate scone from Gail's and Moisés Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

Along with the Beatles, Liam Neeson and James Joyce, Oscar Wilde was a major high school love of mine. Our relationship began when I was about fourteen and took me to a number of interesting places, including central Pennsylvania's only art cinema, where I watched Stephen Fry's portrayal in Wilde. The apotheosis of my Wilde years (combining as it did two great loves) was Liam Neeson's 1998 performance in The Judas Kiss on Broadway. My mother was my constant companion in pursuit of this obsession - as I was underage, I certainly wouldn't have gotten in to Wilde on my own - and deserves credit for her understanding and support of an artistic interest that included more exposure to adult male bodies in various states of undress than the average 15 year old girl generally encounters (particularly in central Pennsylvania).

It's been some years since I've thought about Wilde and re-reading Kaufman's play, which I saw at Open Stage of Harrisburg during the heyday of my affection, was both a reminder and affirmation. Listen to this - go on, read it out loud:

Wilde Art has a spiritual ministry. It can raise and sanctify everything it touches, and popular disapproval must not impede its progress.

Art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament. Art is what makes the life of the whole race immortal.

Narrator 5 From The English Renaissance of Art:

Wilde The arts are the only civilizing influences in the world, and without them people are barbarians. An aesthetic education, which humanizes people, is far more important even for politicians than an economic education, which does the opposite.

(Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. London: Methuen (1998). pp 66-67.)

In recent years, I have become somewhat cynical with regards to great claims for art - and manifestos generally. Last fall, I was teaching Artaud and had a hard time not rolling my eyes, though at the same time I was incredibly happy for my deeply entranced students. But this stirs me up and feels so incredibly right that I want to frame and hang it over my desk. It also strikes me how similar Wilde and Václav Havel are in some respects - Wilde's words could serve as an indictment of neoliberalism and Klausian politics and evokes Havel's assertion that asking why humans need culture is tantamount to asking why they are human beings.

On a micro-level, reconnecting with Wilde reaffirms my affection for the beautiful, for stylish living. Occasionally, particularly in academic circles (and even in certain artistic ones), a concern for elegance, graciousness and ceremony can seem trivial, or be readily trivialized. If I ruminate too long (and how long is too long?) on the beautiful cut of a pair of trousers, or the horror of cheap faux fur, a part of me can't help thinking I'm wasting time that would be better spent reading critical theory. Certainly some lifestyle fetishes are created by the media, whipped up to make us spend money and want things we don't need. But genuinely gracious living, true devotion to Beauty is nothing to do with this. It finds the spiritual in the quotidian. It elevates us and makes us realize we can do better. It emphasizes our humanity. And today it has made me feel that what I do is not in vain, that the English in particular need foreigners possessing eccentric yet cultivated taste, self-confidence and intolerance towards small-mindedness. And that is something lovely indeed, particularly when one feels a bit under the weather.