Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Perils of Pleasure on the Lost Highway

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:

. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)

From Oscar Wilde to Plato to Hank Williams here channeled hauntingly through Kurt Nilsen and Willie Nelson:

I'm a rollin' stone all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway

Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman's lies make a life like mine
On the day we met, I went astray
I started rollin' down that lost highway

I was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I'm lost, too late to pray
Lord I paid the cost, on the lost highway

Now boys don't start your ramblin' 'round
On this road of sin are you sorrow bound
Take my advice or you'll curse the day.
You started rollin' down that lost highway.

Tom Petty version.

The Byrds, Life in Prison

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Nina Simone, House of the Rising Sun

Doc Watson, Tom Dooley. The Kingston Trio's 'collegiate folk' version from 1958.

Merle Haggard, The Fugitive

Marty Robbins, Devil Woman