Today I was able to teach Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” for class. I’ve only read a handful of Wilde’s work before, so I was excited to jump at the chance – and I loved it! I’ve really liked his work so far and was excited to dive into one of his other pieces, “De Profundis,” for my read in place choice. I felt like doing it in front of his statue in Merrion Square was perfect – as Dr. Richardson was describing, Wilde’s face is meant to depict both tragedy and comedy – like the theatre masks – and reading “De Profundis” shows a much more serious, somber side of Wilde. As I mentioned after my reading, my justification for choosing the passage from the “letter” that I decided to read was because I felt it gave a sense of how Wilde was feeling at the time – alone, sorrowful, and very much stuck in a liminal space that he feels he may not get out of. Much like the feeling of paralysis in Joyce’s Dubliners, I get an intense feeling of sadness and a sense of going nowhere when I read “De Profundis.” Wilde was released from jail in 1897 and died in 1900 – so his feeling of going nowhere was actually fairly accurate. He lived his last few years in exile, completely deprived of money and his previous luxurious life. His wife refused to meet with him and allow him to see his children. He died in Paris of meningitis in 1900 and is currently buried right outside the city – so geographically he was able to escape his liminal space, but I believe he was never able to feel free again.

For those that are interested, the passage that I read from “De Profundis” is as follows:

Suffering is one very long moment.  We cannot divide it by seasons.  We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.  With us time itself does not progress.  It revolves.  It seems to circle round one centre of pain.  The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change.  Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.  The very sun and moon seem taken from us.  Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey.  It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart.  And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.  The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.  Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .