"Untruthful! My nephew Algernon?" Lady Bracknell exclaims in The Importance of Being Earnest. "Impossible! He is an Oxonian." [....] We can take another lead from Oscar Wilde--this time from his remark in "The Decay of Lying" that it is wrong to think Art imitates Nature. On the contrary, Nature imitates Art [...]. The same principle applies to literary fiction and social realities: "Literature always anticipates life." I want to apply Wilde's paradox, in all seriousness, to Lawrence of Arabia.