connections to dorian gray

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau

btw...i finished the book at last! woohoo! and it occurs to me that stories that are written today have no moral to them. it seems that in previous centuries, literature and the author wrote for the purpose of "having something to say"...to express some notion to the general audience that everyone "knows" but is afraid to say out loud. a friend of mine just finished reading "pride and prejudice" by jane austen and i "the picture of dorian gray" by oscar wilde. i recall the immense sympathy that i felt for raskolnikov in doestoevsky's "crime and punishment". the modern novel, perhaps i haven't read too many novels written of our time, doesn't seem to possess the same type of power to relate the character to you, the reader.

for example, although dorian gray was a 20 something male who had a benefactor which made him forever wealthy, attending operas and smoking in opium dens, i could very much understand the voice in his head. i'm definitely not forever wealthy, nor have i ever been to an opera and much less an opium den, but i could hear the conversations of thought that made his heart & motives go tick-tock very much within my own self.

everyone is in love with the dan brown novels these days..."the davinci code" and "angels & demons". i haven't read them yet, and so maybe i'm judgments that i shouldn't, but i just can't imagine how these books can "speak" to an audience for such a long period of time. what are going to be the dorian gray's and elizabeth bennett's of our day?

maybe eric is right...in our day and age, no one wants to be reminded of morality.