How to Live like Dorian Gray
blogThe Picture of Dorian Gray is a melodramatic gothic novel populated by flat characters with overheated emotions. It is then the perfect vehicle from which to deliver clever epigrams about to how to live. Through the author substitute, Lord Henry Wotton, and his errant Pygmalion, Dorian Gray, something approaching an archetype of dandyism emerges. It is all there: the experimental nature of the dandy’s existence, his mode of dressing, his individuality, his uselessness, his sang-froid, his attention to detail, and, most importantly, his devotion to the self.
Here I illustrate some choice quotes with some thoughts of my own.
Self-Development
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.
The dandy is, above all, the man who cultivates himself. He treats mind and body like a walled garden in which to plant curious flowers in neat, weed-free patterns. To become wholly oneself without needing to impress anyone other than yourself or feeling hemmed in by society’s mores — this is the goal of the dandy.
Anti-conformism
Human nature is plastic, look at the cultures of the world, what incredible variety! It is absurd, which such possibilities, to seek conformity. This doesn’t mean that we should be selfish, it is rather conforming which is selfish, as Wilde explains in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type.
To develop the self is not, however, easy. You need to be prepared to think, to forego the distractions that entrance the masses and square who you are with who you want to be. It helps, of course, to be independently wealthy, like Dorian Gray, but don’t use lack of money as an excuse to neglect yourself.
Experimentation
He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
People who think too much about themselves tend to be awkward and self-conscious. They are incapable of being in the moment because they are too busy thinking about it. In order to live we need to train the senses to take everything in. We also have to experiment — to try new experiences and to receive new sensations. Never pass up the opportunity to taste a new dish or smell a new perfume. Undertake arbitrary experiments in living that show an entirely new aspect to existence. Above all, live in the moment and find pleasure wherever you may be — notice a new detail, see the riches of nature all around you:
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
Clothes
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The most common misconception about dandyism is that it is all about clothes, “a clothes-wearing philosophy”, as Carlyle calls it. No, the dandy’s manner of dressing is, as Lord Whimsy says “the tip of the iceberg” — it is the outward show of inner refinement. Dressing well is a silent display of one’s decision making processes — every sock shows a thought or a lack of thought. We are a compound of decisions, so make them well.
Ignorant people sometimes wonder if a system of thought which, like Dandyism, celebrates individuality doesn’t produce a kind of conformity of those that espouse it. This is like saying that using the same kind of fertilizer will produce the same plants. Individuality is in your DNA, literally, it is the process of dandyism that helps it to emerge from the safety of conformity.
Uselessness
I’m so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
How much more interesting the world would be if every artist manqué used their energies to develop their personalities rather than fill the world with dreary paintings and poetry! The dandy knows that their personality is more enduring and infinitely more interesting than most novels.
Sang-Froid
To become the spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.
The paradox at the heart of dandyism is that it cultivates the self whilst dissociating from the ego. The ego is another outward sign of the inner refinement, it is the conscious mind shaped by a billion past decisions. The only way to escape from ego stagnation is to experiment and act. By more we act, the more we become who we are. The less you act, the more reduced your existence. Suffering comes from associating too deeply with the illusion of the ego, this prison you call a personality. Lose the ego and you escape the prison.
Attention to Detail
Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Inattentive people make poor valuations: they are the bourgeois fools who look at the label rather than the cut, they are the myopics for whom everything has to be new. By attending to the details, the dandy understands that existence is shaped by habit. If you can train yourself to be mindful when you make a pot of tea, it will be easier to be mindful elsewhere. To paraphrase Quentin Crisp: there is no point daydreaming about being a ballet dance if you’ve spent 20 years as pig farmer. By then, pigs are your style. So attend to the details now, not at some indeterminate point in the future.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the story of a man upon whom all the entropy of existence is suffered by a painting and not himself. It is the classic teenage novel, overflowing with the kind of deliciously paradoxical ideas that inflame the youthful imagination, filling it with possibilities. It legitimates the kind of self-experimentation and self-examination that the young love to indulge in. My own copy, read when I was seventeen, is full of biro underlinings and exclamation marks — attempts to etch in my mind the many exquisite (and generally sound) aphorisms of Lord Henry Wotton.