Everyone knows the heart-gripping, painful conclusion of
Tale of Two Cities. And everyone, of course, knows this is one of my favorite and most revered chapters in the narrow sphere of secular literature that I can ever recall reading. Here's a snippet:
I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both...It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
These to me are perhaps the most powerful lyrics of the entire piece. Yet they pale, fade, wither, etc. when compared to a single phrase uttered by Jesus on the cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is interpreted, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" Here is the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate price, for behind it we find the most meaningful purpose of all creation. Perhaps this is where Dicken's novel is so touching; here, where it climaxes with asymptotic approach the ultimate sacrifice ever known to mankind.
And then we have the classic, epic, (and potentially hackneyed) opening stanza to this book, in which Dickens poetically recounts in the most superfluous fashion:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Here it seems as if Dickens was gathering some inspiration from Paul's testimony in
2 Corinthians 6:9-11, where the apostle describes a life of ministry as one who is being poured out on behalf of the souls of those for whom he labored. Where in other places the apostle describes the new covenant ministry (4:1, etc), here he portrays the living of the new covenant ministers:
As unknown and yet well known; as dying and yet behold we live; as being disciplined and yet not being put to death; As made sorrowful yet always rejoicing; as poor yet enriching many; as having nothing and yet possessing all things. Our mouth is opened to you, Corinthians; our heart is enlarged.
For all the verbosity that is Charles Dickens, what I most appreciate about this chapter is his narrative personification (
de rigueur?) of Fate and Death, the Woodman and the Farmer. The harbingers of revolution are bustling about, but they work unceasingly; they work silently. And it is this tantalizing art that makes
A Tale of Two Cities into such a classic. So we end here tonight, with an excerpt from what now happens to be my favorite chapter in English literature:
It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrels of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.
