Now there was a girl when I was young who lived in the next block and who used to pass our door every day on her way back and forth from school. I remember that her name was Phyllis. She used to wear a blue skirt and a blue blazer and a crisp white Catholic school blouse, and the pocket of her blouse was always stained with blue ink from a leaky fountain pen. She had very large, very round eyes, and I remember too---or at least I think I remember---that they were also blue like ink. And even though I was much younger than Phyllis, an ungainly boy to her blossoming teenager, she did not turn away and avert her gaze the way older kids always did, but instead she would look directly into my eyes and smile the brightest smile I had ever seen in my very young life and whisper "Hello". That was over forty years ago, but I've never forgotten.
Where O Where Dear Lord does everything finally go to?
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Scrooge and Time
Re-reading Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" for the umpteenth time. An annual Christmas ritual.
As always, I am intrigued by Scrooge’s promise to live in the ‘past, the present, and the future’ all at once.
What could it possibly mean to do this?
Conventional wisdom exhorts us to ‘let go’ of the past and ‘not worry’ too much about the future. Every pop-psychology guru worth his or her salt has this refrain down cold. Not past, not future, only NOW equals happiness.
But is this really the best advice for us to follow?
(For a novelist or short story writer---certainly not. The past invokes memory, the future---imagination. These are the two basic tools of any fiction writer. A writer who exists only in the here-and-now is not likely to be very productive. But even for non-writers, our cherished memories and our hopes for the future are what give the greater portion of meaning and joy to our lives).
But getting back to Scrooge...
As we meet him in Stave One Scrooge is a man who has clearly taken the pop gurus' wisdom to a bitter extreme. Scrooge is completely cut off from his past---the finer feelings he once held for his sister Fan and his lost love Belle, as well as whatever ideals he may have begun his life with; and, with no children of his own or anyone else’s to care about, Scrooge has no stake whatsoever in any possible future. Sitting day-after-day day in his ‘money-changing hole’, amassing a hidden fortune to no apparent purpose, taking his melancholy meal in his usual melancholy tavern and slurpping up his bowl of gruel before going to bed, Scrooge is a man locked into a bleak and dismal present. The whole concept of ‘time’ is rendered meaningless in his life. For Ebenezer Scrooge, time, quite literally, ‘is money’.
(Notice that I said Scrooge is 'locked into' the present, not 'living' in the present. Whatever Scrooge is doing, it can hardly be called living in any sense beyond physical survival).
So alienated, in fact, is the unredeemed Scrooge from any sense of Time, that until the Ghost of Christmas Future leads him by the hand to his own cold and neglected grave, it never seems to have occurred to him that one day he will actually have to die. A sense of one's own mortality is, of course, inseparable from the experience of Time. But it is the last part of the puzzle; Scrooge will first have to voyage in other directions.
It seems to me, then, that A Christmas Carol is not so much a ghost story (as Dickens himself calls it) but rather a time-travel story, of the kind in which J. B. Priestly would later excel in his plays Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before. The Carol is the story of a man recovering the experience of Time in his life.
And of course, the instrument that re-binds Scrooge back to Time is Love.
It is love alone that transcends death. Love for the people and days we have lost keeps them alive in memory. Love of the children in our lives involves us in a future we ourselves will not experience.
(For Scrooge, of course, the children are Tiny Tim, to whom he becomes a 'second father', and presumably nephew Fred's brood, when and if they make their appearance).
In finally recognizing the truth of all this, Scrooge is once again able to take up the burden of Time that he abandoned so many years before, and, while unable to ever go back and undo his past mistakes, he is able through Love to make the present a bridge between the past he has lost and the future he will never see.
As always, I am intrigued by Scrooge’s promise to live in the ‘past, the present, and the future’ all at once.
What could it possibly mean to do this?
Conventional wisdom exhorts us to ‘let go’ of the past and ‘not worry’ too much about the future. Every pop-psychology guru worth his or her salt has this refrain down cold. Not past, not future, only NOW equals happiness.
But is this really the best advice for us to follow?
(For a novelist or short story writer---certainly not. The past invokes memory, the future---imagination. These are the two basic tools of any fiction writer. A writer who exists only in the here-and-now is not likely to be very productive. But even for non-writers, our cherished memories and our hopes for the future are what give the greater portion of meaning and joy to our lives).
But getting back to Scrooge...
As we meet him in Stave One Scrooge is a man who has clearly taken the pop gurus' wisdom to a bitter extreme. Scrooge is completely cut off from his past---the finer feelings he once held for his sister Fan and his lost love Belle, as well as whatever ideals he may have begun his life with; and, with no children of his own or anyone else’s to care about, Scrooge has no stake whatsoever in any possible future. Sitting day-after-day day in his ‘money-changing hole’, amassing a hidden fortune to no apparent purpose, taking his melancholy meal in his usual melancholy tavern and slurpping up his bowl of gruel before going to bed, Scrooge is a man locked into a bleak and dismal present. The whole concept of ‘time’ is rendered meaningless in his life. For Ebenezer Scrooge, time, quite literally, ‘is money’.
(Notice that I said Scrooge is 'locked into' the present, not 'living' in the present. Whatever Scrooge is doing, it can hardly be called living in any sense beyond physical survival).
So alienated, in fact, is the unredeemed Scrooge from any sense of Time, that until the Ghost of Christmas Future leads him by the hand to his own cold and neglected grave, it never seems to have occurred to him that one day he will actually have to die. A sense of one's own mortality is, of course, inseparable from the experience of Time. But it is the last part of the puzzle; Scrooge will first have to voyage in other directions.
It seems to me, then, that A Christmas Carol is not so much a ghost story (as Dickens himself calls it) but rather a time-travel story, of the kind in which J. B. Priestly would later excel in his plays Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before. The Carol is the story of a man recovering the experience of Time in his life.
And of course, the instrument that re-binds Scrooge back to Time is Love.
It is love alone that transcends death. Love for the people and days we have lost keeps them alive in memory. Love of the children in our lives involves us in a future we ourselves will not experience.
(For Scrooge, of course, the children are Tiny Tim, to whom he becomes a 'second father', and presumably nephew Fred's brood, when and if they make their appearance).
In finally recognizing the truth of all this, Scrooge is once again able to take up the burden of Time that he abandoned so many years before, and, while unable to ever go back and undo his past mistakes, he is able through Love to make the present a bridge between the past he has lost and the future he will never see.
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