A Tale for the Season, Oct. 30, 2025

It’s one of most bizarre human episodes, waking in a dark room and not knowing where you are. It usually lasts just a few seconds, but there’s that tingle of panic when it persists even as we come fully awake: Where am I?

We then arrive at the moment where we laugh a little at ourselves. Of course, I’m …

But a few years ago, it was no laughing matter when Sean woke in that dark room, and it wasn’t just a few seconds, but minutes, going on and on, where he was completely unaware of his surroundings, or how he got there, floating in darkness, a complete blackout of the mind. He was terrified.

Finally, Sean rolled out of bed, unsteadily stepping with arm outstretched, until he felt cloth, and pulled the curtain on a view of a park five stories below under lumpy skies the color of porridge.

Dublin. The end of October. A hotel room he’d entered at 4 a.m. after a long flight from New York. Himself again. Suddenly. Or was he?

Sean was on a magazine assignment. A hit Broadway play was running about the early life and family of Oscar Wilde — author, wit, persecuted human rights icon — focused partly on Oscar’s mother, Lady Wilde, a poet whose pen name was “Speranza.” He forgot who it was — someone at the magazine? — who said he should contact an American, Jane Elgee, studying at a Dublin university for a doctorate whose thesis was Lady Wilde. It would be a nice hook for the piece: young intellectual 21st-century woman enmeshed in the life of a young intellectual 19th-century woman. They had connected and Jane agreed to speak with him today.    

Out on the street, the day before Halloween, it was lightly raining with the sun shining. Ireland has her madness and her weather still, as someone said. Sean thought of an expression his mother would use to describe this sun/rain phenomenon: The Devil is fighting with his wife. As a boy, it made perfect sense, but as he grew, it was only an inscrutable, entertaining bit of folklore.

Mid-afternoon, the streets filled. He was startled to see a horse-drawn carriage pass in the stream of cars. A young woman came toward him, hair dyed platinum, orange and blue, her jeans so distressed they seemed in need of calming medication. But behind came another young woman, dressed in a wide bonnet, a lady’s rain cape and long dress. He passed a townhouse; in the front garden there seemed to be a soup kitchen, people in rags, emaciated children bawling.

Two boys passed, denim jackets, faces pierced, followed by a man with a briefcase and suit, then a woman in a long, plain dress, a stained white apron, her hands raw. Sean looked around — was a production filming a period piece and the extras taking a break?

In a café he met Jane. Tall, attractive, in her mid-20s, in a dark skirt, high-collared white blouse with a pin — would you call it a brooch? — that looked like a dog’s head, surrounded by little spikes.

Sean was immediately disheartened when Jane began, as sources for articles sometimes do, by telling him what the focus of his piece should be, and that he shouldn’t just do “a trendy, shallow take” on the poet Speranza. “You know, what she wore, the fabulous soirees she hosted, that meaningless stuff.” To counter, he asked her what Jane would write, which would make him sound reasonable, but knowing he would write what he wanted.

“I want you to write about The Famine,” she said, “as Speranza did. And write about famines that are continuing to this day. This minute.”

Sean was unaware of Speranza writing about “The Great Hunger,” as the famine of the 1840s is called by the Irish. He knew what everyone knows, that the masses were so buried in poverty they lived on a diet consisting almost solely of potatoes, which have enough nutrients to keep a body functioning, and when blights struck the crop, they died of starvation or illnesses caused by malnutrition. One million perished, and another two million emigrated, many to the United States in so-called “coffin ships,” so many died on the journey. 

But Jane told him something new. That The Famine was not an act of cruel nature, but a crime. “As a young person of privilege in the late 1840s, she dedicated herself to exposing the horror. She chose her name, Speranza, or Hope in Italian, and wrote lines about her countrymen and women who ‘starve and die, for want of bread in their own rich land.’”

There was fierceness in her lovely face as she continued: “As I said, this was a crime, the same as famines before and since, up to this minute. About Ireland, George Bernard Shaw said, ‘When a country is full of food and exporting it, there can be no famine.’ Cattle, sheep and grain were raised and exported throughout The Great Hunger. There were reports of boatloads of grain, brought in as relief from British Quakers, passing boats full of Irish grain on their way to English markets. It spurred Speranza to action, and she joined others to expose the imperialists and their complicity in the deaths of millions.”

Two coffee cups sat untouched between them. “When a world is full of food and exporting it,” Jane said evenly, “famine is a man-made catastrophe. Today.”

The happy buzz in the café continued as Sean stared at her face, and then looked again at the glittering silver pin on her blouse of the dog’s head surrounded by short spikes. She took it off and placed it on the table in front of him. “I brought this for you,” Jane said. 

He looked again. Not a dog, but a wolf. 

“Have you ever heard the ancient Latin expression, Homo homini lupus?”

He looked from the wolf’s face to hers.

“‘Man is wolf to man.’ Speranza knew that. Every writer should, and try to do something about it.”

She put on a short rain jacket and rose from the table. “Remember what she stood for when you write.”

“Don’t go. I …” But she was walking past tables. He saw her through the window, disappearing down the street in the weak sun and rain. The Devil still fighting with his wife.

Sean took his phone and looked at his contacts. No Jane Elgee to be found. He Googled her name to find: Jane Elgee, Lady Wilde, the poet Speranza.

He came fully awake in the dark room. It took only a moment, but he knew where he was. A crazy dream, he told himself, right? He had a meeting with an academic, but he was a middle-aged man, a biographer of Oscar Wilde, and the appointment was for dinner.

What time was it? He reached for his phone on the bedside table but grabbed something else in the dark. With the light on, he saw silver glittering in his palm. And closed his fist on the pin, flexing once or twice to be reassured by the small spikes digging into his flesh.