Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

This is a dream come true in Oscar Wilde’s only novel: “The Picture Of Dorian Gray”, Dorian Gray, the protagonist, tries to stop the natural aging process, denying the passing of time and death. In the novel, Dorian is the subject of a picture by a painter called Basil Hallward who develops a level of worship for the young man’s beauty. Dorian is easily corrupted by the ideas of Basil’s friend Lord Henry Wotton, who warns him that his extraordinary beauty and youth will fade, and tells him to make the most of it. With Henry’s words ringing in his ears, Dorian immediately views Basil’s portrait of him in a new light and becomes aware of time, and of his own beauty as a thing that will fade. Once he realises that beauty is not something he can own forever, that it will be taken from him by time, he wants desperately to keep it. As a consequence, having his soul trapped within a painting, Dorian gains immortality. He does not age and seems to be immune to all conventional illnesses, diseases, infections and viruses (maybe also corona virus ……a lucky guy, isn’t he?). As time goes on, the portrait shows him to age yet he still remains young and attractive even when he starts a life of sin, hedonism and debauchery while the portrait highlights and haunts him showing the scars and signs of his immorality. The discrepancy between Dorian’s outer purity and his inner depravity is depicted through his body’s youthfulness and the painting’s ugliness. However, we can easily find out that Dorian and the painting are both good and evil. We can find the same theme in the novel by R. L. Stevenson “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, the story of a doctor who tries to separate good and evil by creating a monster. I think the two writers sent a strong message to late-Victorian readers; I also believe that the modern day reader is more willing to accept human duality. The public and private selves in late-Victorian society were supposed to be separate things. Victorians were very hypocritical in their behaviour by acting one way in public and another way in private. Being both good and evil is a natural thing just as aging. According to Stephen Hawking, the famous researcher who died in 2018, the aging process happens, as the universe expands. In his book "The Theory of Everything", he wonders why time goes forward and quotes the English author Leslie Poles Hartley, who in his book "The Go-Between" writes "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there; but why is the past so different from the future? Why do we remember the past but not the future?” To explain this Hawking talks about the arrows of time and in particular makes the example of a cup that falls off the table and breaks. If this law were to be subverted, man's nature would be overturned, and as Hawking explains, this is only possible in films, where the shards of the cup can rise from the floor and rejoin on the table, or man can stop aging. It's a gimmick that has a strong impact in cinematography, because it breaks the normal conception that we have of "everything". David Fincher, a famous contemporary filmmaker, made this subversion in the film "The curious case of Benjamin Button", based on the 1922 story of the same name by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. The Oscar-winning 2009 film is set in New Orleans, where Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt) was born on the last day of the First World War. The first scene we see is in a hospital room in which the elderly Daisy Fuller tells her daughter that in 1918 a prestigious watchmaker had built a majestic clock, which had a peculiar course, the hands ran counterclockwise. She then makes her last wish before dying, asking her daughter to read a diary written by the love of her life, Benjamin, who tells of his strange existence. Born with a strange pathology, Benjamin had the health of a ninety year old man trapped in the body of a child. His life really begins when he discovers that he is getting younger instead of older. At 85 Benjamin will die in the form of a newborn baby. This cinematic experience is moving and lays bare the fragility of the human being, who finds himself faced with an upheaval in his life, but also shows the strength he has in overcoming every obstacle, with all the doubts and curiosities that appear in his journey and all the adventures that the search for these answers entails. It’s all about time, but what if time didn’t exist? This is the theory of Carlo Rovelli, the most famous Italian scholar who is related to time. The physicist explains how the common notion of time does not correspond to the results of physics over the last hundred years: there is no great clock that beats the time of the universe everywhere in the same way, but it depends on place and speed. Perhaps time corresponds to the way we see things but it is not part of the fundamental structure of the universe.