The Genius of Kindness

Don't you just love Oscar Wilde? If you're a long-time admirer of his wit (as am I), I'd like to bring up another aspect of his genius: his kindness. His ability to place himself in the shoes of another human being, to feel compassion, to understand what it means to be human.
This is a little random, I suppose, but I've been thinking a great deal lately on the way that reading great literature and attempting to write it has the power like little else in life to spur us on toward growth in virtue. Patience is an obvious one...perseverance...but the one I've been thinking on most is compassion. There are so many people who don't bother with compassion because they equate it with weakness. But I should hope that as writers we become so trained in imagining what it is like to be someone else that we will always take that extra thought before saying something that might be hurtful--and if we do say it, perhaps we are more culpable than those who didn't pause.
My sister Rose (I know, I've been blogging about you a lot, Rose--sorry!) is writing her senior thesis on Oscar Wilde. I'm going to mess up the thesis statement completely here, but it's something along the lines of: Oscar Wilde's passion for beauty was his salvation. Ok, yes, the poetry of her original statement was just ruthlessly murdered--but even as poorly as I put it, it's something to think about...
I was psyched when she told me this, remembering a line from one of Wilde's little-known fairy tales, The Young King: "And it seems that from the very first moment of his recognition he had shown signs of that strange passion for beauty that was destined to have so great an influence over his life."
Isn't it amazing what a love of beauty can do to you? It makes ugliness so much uglier. It makes unkindness so much crueler.
Anyway, as a result of our discussions, Rose sent me an extremely well-thought-out article by Stephen Fry. It's a couple years old and a little long, but you should absolutely read it if you have the time. I'm going to quote the last line here, because it is the one on which this whole rambling hinges:
"It is odd that we value knowledge above feeling and persuade ourselves too that knowledge is more difficult than feeling..."
I believe that the ability to feel is a genius in itself.

(If you haven't read everything Oscar Wilde wrote, you probably should go to the library...but here's a few for starters:
The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
Lady Windermere's Fan)