Oscar

I just read "The Picture of Dorian Gray." A treatise on pleasure. Everyone is beautiful and selfish or ugly and envious. Either way you die young or unrequited or victimized. Oscar uses words like pomegranate, sphinx, and vermillion--which I haven't heard in a while. His characters are dukes, lords, and countesses. No corporals or sheiks.

I remember a documentary film about soldiers in Iraq. Their commander said he was reading "Harry Potter" books as a way to temporarily escape war and reconnect with his children in America. I don't have kids. And I've never been much of an escapist. But "Dorian Gray" is definitely impossible in Baghdad: for G.I.s and Iraqis alike.

Everyone's preoccupied here. On one extreme you have duty and fraternity. On the other: survival, loneliness, and boredom.