"I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me..."

I'm sitting here alone in my room, but not particularly lonely this cold autumn night. In fact, I'm feeling rather amazed as I hear Oscar Wilde, seated across the room from me with legs crossed, saying drolly, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." I put down the book I am reading, Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, and find myself forced into humble agreement. I'm about one-third of the way finished, and acutely aware that I'm looking for any excuse to put this book down when I can because I don't think I can bear for it to end. Toru Watanabe is the main character. He and I are the same age, and we are both writing because it is the only way we can understand the things that have happened to us. Toru's life forever changed when his best friend in high school committed suicide--just as my life did when the Asia I loved blacked out of existence and slipped into a coma it would never wake up from. I actually first set eyes on this book nearly seven years ago. My best friend in Korea, Sung, had given it to me on my birthday. I think you would really like it, he said in the artless way he always spoke. Naturally, I put the thing aside and never got around to it. I don't know why I wandered into a bookstore at Penn Station last Thursday. Or why I should have suddenly remembered after all this time. But there it was. My hand trembled as I took it down from the shelf. I felt as if Sung was trying to tell me something--perhaps that we had been best friends for reasons we would never fully comprehend.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

With world news lately dominated by tedious stories of war and political intrigue, it was truly refreshing to read this morning about the Brits honoring one of their greatest: Oscar Wilde, named in a poll of 3,000 people to be Britain's greatest wit. My first introduction to Oscar Wilde was back in the early 90s when I was a graduate student. A fellow classmate from the Netherlands made a reference to the play The Importance of Being Earnest, upon which I went out and bought a copy of the Irishman's collected writings. Without knowing anything of Wilde's sexuality, (and still in denial over my own) I was completely captivated by the power of his language, the way it contrived nothing and everything all at once. (A year later in Paris, I visited his grave at Pere Lachaise Cemetery to pay my respects.)

Although a celebrated playwright in the 1890s, Wilde was eventually brought to trial for his gay lifestyle; convicted; and imprisoned. The years in jail were not kind to him, and he would only live two more years as a free man. On his death bed, he is reported to have said: "Either those curtains go, or I do." Money and friends had deserted him in the end, but his wit and style served him until the last. Indeed, money and friends will come and go but once you lose yourself, you have nothing. Wilde was proud to know it then. I am humbled to know it now.