"The living dies, and what has died comes back to life, that which is young grows old and what is old becomes young, what stays awake falls asleep and that which was asleep wakes up, the tide of birth and death will never stop." (Heraclit)

One of the most important problems of Dorian's is the terrible confusion between happiness and pleasure. Dorian confesses his wishes "I do not seek happiness but pleasure", revealing his superficiality. He slowly drowns within an empirical world, an earthly life of senses, and forgets to worthy his inner life, only to follow a primrose path to a certain death.

"The happiness" of Dorian Gray comes from the eternal beauty that he had desired so desperately and is considered the highest goal of his life, the foundation of his being. He cannot reach true feelings for he is always looking for pleasure. The evolution of this situation somewhat resembles a "postponement" of the really important things in his life. As a result of his invisible alteration of youth, beauty and mind, he postpones becoming an adult. Dorian fails in "translating" the adolescent emotion into adult feeling. He is afraid of his own unconscious desires which makes him hide away even from himself.

Pleasure is, for Dorian, sensation. He gives too much importance to his sensations, blocking his way to fulfillment which leads to the exaggeration of senses that makes him incapable to focus on the feeling. He lives in the present, tries to erase his past and is interested in the future only influenced by the present.

The pleasure offered by keeping his teenage look upon his face, parallel with the aparently irreversible transformations of the portrait is mistaken with happiness. This feeling of unlimited freedom makes him feel complete. However, Dorian will end up trapped in this euphorical state, a world that he had created to be perfect, but, in reality, his so-called "freedom" is artificial, limited and so fragile!

"For rise and ruin, ruin and rise constitute the standard of all of nature's life spheres, the small ones together with the large ones. The cosmos itself, as it rose from the primordial fire, so it will return in it - a double process which happens and will happen forever. Nature also tends to what is antagonistic, from here, and not from what is identical, comes it's harmony." (Heraclit)

Ion Ruxandra, X F1

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