Notes on this Issue:

This past month I’ve kept myself preoccupied with the writings of Leo Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde, particularly A Confession and The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the first piece, Tolstoy delves into how he began to value religious investigation and truth over any of his literary or other intellectual studies in the latter years of his life. While in the second, Wilde voices through a few characters that, in pursuing high-quality artistic output, the process and product of creating a piece act as an absolution for any moral indecencies that may have been committed or used as an aid to the artist.

I deeply cherish and revere aesthetic pleasures and value the pursuit of it nearly as much as I do the path of finding eternal religious truths. However, despite siding with Tolstoy’s stance, I find that, as time goes on, I live according to Wilde’s philosophy more and more—valuing beautiful artistic output over vice and the deprivation of virtue. As Wilde puts it: “Vice and virtue are to the artist materials of an art.”

- W.B.