One is constantly besieged by the tyranny of those who claim to seek ‘depth’. They speak in hushed, reverent tones of profound truths, of hidden meanings, and of the soul’s innermost complexities. They mistake the difficult for the interesting and the obscure for the beautiful. It is an utterly tedious contemporary malady. I confess, I have always found the pursuit of depth to be a most provincial and distinctly unaesthetic occupation. It suggests a profound lack of imagination, a failure to appreciate the exquisite, finished surface of things.
The Triumph of Surface Over Substance
The cult of depth is merely the worshipping of what is unfinished, unpolished, and, more often than not, quite dull. The truly fascinating individual understands that the only things of value in life are those that lie upon the surface. The sheen of a beautifully cut gem, the perfect fold of a silk cravat, the fleeting wit of a perfectly phrased compliment—these are the things that provide delight, and delight is the only quality worth pursuing. To look beneath the surface is to court disaster, for one invariably finds not a profound truth, but merely the vulgar machinery of existence, or, worse, a clumsy, brutal sincerity.
The superficial man is the only man who is truly free. He is unburdened by the tedious complexities and the sordid facts that others mistake for ‘reality’. His focus is on style, not sincerity. He is the one who understands that life is a matter of artifice and performance, a delightful, ever-changing masquerade. To surrender to depth is to concede to utility ; it is to imply that one’s very being requires a tedious justification or a dreary moral virtue. But the exquisitely superficial person understands that existence is its own justification, and its highest expression is to be an absolute, unmitigated delight.
A man’s style is the ultimate expression of his soul, and style is entirely a matter of the surface. It is the beautifully constructed mask he chooses to present to the world, a captivating fiction that is infinitely more interesting than the raw, unedited chaos of his heart. To be a master of the superficial is to master the art of living. It is to acknowledge that the world craves not a mirror of its own dreary reality, but a window into a more beautifully constructed one. The grandest triumphs—in art, in love, and in conversation—are always those of surface.
The Elegance of the Superficial: An Oscar Wilde’s philosophy
This embrace of the superficial is not merely a preference; it is a core tenet of the Aesthete’s Dilemma—the necessary choice between the dull goodness of virtue and the ravishing brilliance of beauty and art. To concern oneself with what is merely underneath things is to resign oneself to a life lived in the shadow of tedious facts. This is why the pursuit of authenticity is a modern affliction—it demands that one abandon the infinite possibilities of invention for the limited and rather dreary confines of ‘truth’. Oscar Wilde’s philosophy suggests that one’s life is the most significant work of beauty and art one will ever produce. Why, then, would one leave the marble in its rough, natural state, seeking to expose its inner flaws, rather than polishing it to a brilliant, captivating finish?
Against the Fetish of Depth
One often hears the tiresome phrase, “Still waters run deep.” I reply that the only waters worth contemplating are those that are perpetually stirred by wit and reflection, reflecting the sky and the trees with a dazzling, changeable brilliance—a perfect surface. The notion that something is only valuable if it is hidden or difficult to grasp is simply the vanity of the unimaginative, the secret joy of those who find the obvious to be quite beyond them. It is the intellectual equivalent of praising a dreary court deposition over a fantastical drama. The only tragedy is the waste of a beautiful life, and the greatest waste is to spend it digging for a ‘meaning’ that is, by its very nature, elusive and ugly. Let us instead live as vibrant, captivating fictions. For the true individual is not seeking to be understood; he is seeking to be appreciated for his magnificent divergence.
The truth is, my dear readers, depth is merely the virtue of the well, and no one wishes to dine with a well. We should all aspire to be a beautifully bound volume, replete with intriguing chapters and delightful embellishments, rather than a hastily scribbled note. Let us live for the effect, for the spectacle, and for the sheer, glorious surface of things. A truly elegant life is a continual state of magnificent self-invention , a relentless pursuit of the unnecessary —a process of being both exquisitely useless and irresistibly beautiful.
I have often contemplated these matters while observing the exquisitely useless objects in the collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where the triumph of the unnecessary is cataloged with such meticulous care. One should remember that the most profound and lasting influence one can have on the world is to remind it that existence itself is an art form. And art, my friends, is all about the surface.
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