For St. Patrick’s Day, Books & Books posted a quote from Oscar Wilde: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
These lines also appear in my memoir, along with the ones that precede them, which I discovered in the British Council library in Warsaw, Poland, in 1978. “With the abolition of private property, then,” Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “we shall have true, beautiful, healthy individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live.”
When I finished, I put the book back and headed out into the drab, unhappy streets of Warsaw.
