“Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.” p. 157, The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is a curious thing how when Dorian Gray sought no theory of life, but life itself he actually isolated himself from life. What he sought were the bare pleasures, the tools of pleasure to put in Polanyian terms, but not the realities to which the tools were telling. To really understand the pleasure Dorian Gray would have had to attend to something through them.