The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories

MUST READ BOOK. If you have patience. It has long sentences.

The grey area between right and wrong has certainly been the subject of hundreds of books. Stories of starving thieves, retaliation, and retribution could all be justified in one way or another. The unpleasant side of the right-wrong dichotomy is where this book parks itself, and it moves in the direction of total and utter degeneration of everything, mental, physical, and spiritual.

Dorian Gray is blessed with wealth, class and good genes. Basil Hallward an artist and a good friend, finds in him a muse, and helps him create his best work of art of all time. Dorian is dumbstruck by his own portrait and makes a peculiar wish.
“How sad it is! I should grow old and horrible and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. If it were only the other way, If it were I who was to be always young and the picture that was to grow old! For that I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

In the above quote he wishes for an eternal life of untarnished youth in exchange for his soul. Would you take this deal?
If you see it appropriate to consider a human being as a sum of senses and soul, losing his soul, leaves a man, whose only goal in life is to please his senses to the maximum. Actions are driven by senses. Consequences of actions are borne by the soul. Guilt and empathy are functions of the soul. With his new super power, Dorian is driven by his senses alone, in constant search of beauty above all else. Morality and guilt become mere impediments. If you haven't read the book, this would give you an idea of someone who is wasting away their life, drinking and smoking and sleeping around.
But that's not who Dorian is. Dorian is enlightened, like Buddha, only in the wrong direction.

“ He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of senses its highest realization.”
It's like a uno reverse on the Bhagavad Gita.

This is my favorite quote from the book.
“The worship of the senses has often and with much justice been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organised forms of existences. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality of which a fine instinct of beauty was to be a dominant characteristic”
This is the statement he puts forward. It is enticing; for a moment I'm confused as to whether I agree to his philosophy or not. Dorian's words can confuse your moral compass. He is capable of this because, he has no restraints of a soul, and thus is capable of ignoring consequences. And beauty, though ephemeral, is enticing to everyone.

“There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self torture and self denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.......There was to be as Lord Henry had prophesies a new Hedonism”

Dorian lived with no checks. “There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful” His knowledge of all things beautiful, is incredible. There is whole, very long, boring chapter dedicated to that; as a statement of his knowledge.

People loved Dorian; his beauty and manners. People looked up to him with awe and admiration, but looked back on him with hatred and disgust. The sensation destination train chugs on till something happens. For once Dorian deviates from his pursuit of beauty, when a need arises to cover up the origin of his new life. What if that hadn't happened? Would his hedonistic life have given him everything he wanted till the end of his life? Or was that an inevitable consequence of his deal with the portrait?
The last few chapters are better than many psychological thrillers. A point reaches where his own mind and the people around him turns against him. His past and acts of evil catches up with him when he's weak.

I would not call this a descent into degradation. I have too much respect for him, for that. He failed at life with class. I wouldn't go within a mile of him in real life, lest I be tempted. I would look at him from afar. He is a work of art.