Every Christmas my brother David and his wife Belinda send us Harry and David pears, thereby ruining our pear consumption for the rest of the year. After all, as Helen Mitsios writes in this poem about that sublime fruit, “there was never a pear as perfect as you.”
I’ve read many poems about fruit. There is, of course, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, probably the ultimate example. D. H. Lawrence’s aggressively erotic “Figs,” where he contends that “ripe figs won’t keep,” is his version of Robert Herrick’s “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Li-Young Lee explicitly compares eating a persimmon to a sexual encounter, and Mary Oliver goes into ecstasy over the “sensual inundation” of small wild plums. Mitsios, however, is the first poet I know who gives credit to the marketer.
Having done her homework, Mitsios identifies the Harry and David pears as “Royal Riviera.” One can feel the juice coursing down one’s chin in a line like “luscious and large, golden and blushed.” And then there’s the pun in a line that acts as a refrain: “no other pear compares to my love for you.” Here it is:
Ode to the Royal Riviera Pear By Helen Mitsios
Royal Riviera Pear, there’s no other pear that compares to you. Luscious and large, golden and blushed, like a cherub you arrive on my doorstep in a box with one pear wrapped in gold foil. There was never a pear as perfect as you.
Treasured pear first grown in France, Royal Riviera Pear and cousin of the French Comice pear, revered since 1856, buttery rare, served to royalty and known as the fruit of kings. Or maybe eaten while on a bench, a picnic, or just anywhere. Royal Riviera Pears are delicious without compare.
Grown in Southern Oregon since 1934, picked at the perfect moment, to arrive at the doorstep as a gift or Christmas tradition these 85-plus years.
Perfect box of pears, eaten by folks both big and small. Juicy and scooped with a spoon or on a plate at noon. Royal Riviera Pears, of splendor to eat right away or on a special day, a feast, a treat, or for your sweet.
Royal Riviera Pear, your shape carved in gold for a throne, or I could place you in a picnic basket or on my mantle at home.
A tradition of old, like the partridge in a pear tree or starting anew just for you. You can eat a box yourself or gaze at a pear on a shelf. Royal Riviera, perfect pears fit to be painted in a still life, I admire you while sitting on my kitchen chair.
Legendary pair, maybe Adam and Eve ate a pear in the garden, Homer’s pear, gift of pears to Greek goddesses. Oh, Royal Riviera Pear, you are without compare.
I would carry you in my pocket if I could or wear you on a chain as a locket, most celadon and fragile butterfly-winged of fruits. No matter how or where, nothing compares to you, Royal Riviera Pear.
In sauces or butters, there was never a pear as sweet as you. Pear brandy not as dandy without you, baked pears, pears with nuts and cheese, fruit of sweet curves in pear bread, baked or eaten iced or raw. Oh, most perfect Royal Riviera Pear, no other pear compares to my love for you.
In the words of Rossetti’s goblins, “Come buy, come buy!”
I’m currently reading and very much enjoying Ruth Ozeki’s novel The Book of Form & Emptiness, including one passage that articulates something I’ve long suspected: that the book you most need at a critical point in your life will somehow find its way to you.
For years I’ve held this scientifically unprovable notion. I’ll be walking through a bookstore or library and somehow come across just the right book for the moment. In Ozeki’s novel, such a moment occurs in a craft store:
She needed to get started on the memory quilt project, so a quick stop [in the quilting aisle] would be motivating, but first she had to get past the books. This was her danger zone, and now she steeled herself… The last thing she needed was more books. She gripped the handle of her cart and pushed forward, but just as she was passing the New Releases table, the oddest thing happened. Maybe the table was rickety, or maybe she bumped it on her way by, but something caused one little book to jump off the pile and land inside her shopping cart.
The book is Tidy Magic: The Ancient Zen Art of Clearing Your Clutter and Revolutionizing Your Life, and I’m not far enough into Ozeki’s novel to know what role it will play in Annabelle’s life. But because Ozeki has made her novel itself into a character, with its own speaking voice, we get first-hand testimony that books do indeed have agency. Tidy Magic finds its way to a woman who needs it because that’s what books do:
Of course, it wasn’t actually the universe doing the providing. The universe can’t make a book launch itself off a table. Only a book can do that, although it is no easy feat. There are fables in our world of powerful tomes with the ability to levitate and move by themselves, but since few of us ever get to see this happen, we tend to assume these are just talltales. Books do migrate—look at the pile next to your bed—but lacking legs, we lack mobility, and generally we must rely on you to move us from place to place. To that end, we do our best to make ourselves attractive to you, with our gaudy covers and catchy titles, but Tidy Magic was not likethat. It was a quiet book, not pushy in the least, and yet, it had this extraordinary power to self-propel. Imagine the strength of purpose that requires! Needles to say, we [the collective world of books] were impressed.
So there you have it. We already are aware that books often know us better than we know ourselves. Now we learn that books have special ways of getting that information to us.
It never—as in never—drops to 0 degrees in Tennessee, as it did this past Friday, and states to the north of us are even worse off. This means that it’s time to reach into the closet for Mary Oliver’s “Cold Poem,” which I’ve shared and then reshared in the past when America was pounded by “the arctic express.” At the very least, Oliver provides a glimmer of good that can emerge from this extreme weather event.
Reprinted from Jan. 8, 2014 and Jan. 31, 2019
Much of the United States is caught in extremely cold temperatures at the moment. Although this is causing a great deal of misery, poet Mary Oliver finds benefits to “tree-splitting” cold. For one thing, it gives us a chance to get real.
Cold Poem By Mary Oliver
Cold now. Close to the edge. Almost unbearable. Clouds bunch up and boil down from the north of the white bear. This tree-splitting morning I dream of his fat tracks, the lifesaving suet. I think of summer with its luminous fruit, blossoms rounding to berries, leaves, handsful of grain. Maybe what cold is, is the time we measure the love we have always had, secretly for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe that is what it means, the beauty of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals. In the season of snow, in the immeasurable cold, we grow cruel but honest; we keep ourselves alive, if we can, taking one after another the necessary bodies of others, the many crushed red flowers.
I understand Oliver to be saying that, when we are in the grip of extreme cold–when we feel the breath of death upon us–that is when we value life the most. Just as the polar bear’s life-saving suet keeps it alive in extreme conditions, so we focus on our essential life at such moments as this. Dreaming of summer’s luminous fruit becomes an extraneous luxury.
Our “hard knife-edged love,” Oliver tells us, is for our “own bones,” for “the warm river of the I.” We must acknowledge the life force that burns within us.
That’s why we are so fascinated by “the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals”: we identify with this battle between life and death and know that, in this primal struggle, we need, no less than the shark, to take into ourselves the bodies of others. That’s why we find a beauty to cold.
The cold season, Oliver says, is a season of cruelty and of honesty. Hold that thought in your mind the next time you take a step out into sub-zero temperatures.
Later thought: As I honored Mary Oliver’s life following her recent death, I talked about her views of death and her views of Christianity. She was also an author of numerous depression poems, which stand in dramatic contrast to her ecstasy poems. (I wonder if, like many of our greatest poets, she had bipolar disorder.) Her insight in “Cold Poem” tracks with something that psychologist/philosopher Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul about the value of depression:
Faced with depression, we might ask ourselves, “What is it doing here? Does it have some necessary role to play?”…
Some feelings and thoughts seem to emerge only in a dark mood. Suppress the mood, and you will suppress those ideas and reflections. Depression may be as important a channel for valuable “negative” feelings, as expressions of affection are for the emotions of love…Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other, but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.
Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, Adoration of the Shepherds
Spiritual Sunday – Christmas
Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Birth of Christ” emphasizes the simplicity of the event. “Were you expecting something greater?” the poet asks before observing that God “moves straight through all measurements we know, dissolving them away.”
The theme continues when Rilke observes that the gifts of the Magi are less astonishing than the baby in Mary’s arms. That gift does not “drift for a moment on the air” and “leave behind a vague regret.” That gift is the joy that is remembered forever.
May you all receive a taste of this joy during this holy-day season. Merry Christmas!
The Birth of Christ By Rainer Maria Rilke Trans. by H.D. Herter Norton
Without your simplicity, how could this have happened — what shines now in the dark of night? The God who thundered over the nations makes himself mild and through you enters the world
Were you expecting something greater?
What is greatness? He moves straight through all measurements we know, dissolving them away. Even the path of a star is not like that.
Behold: these kings standing here are great and drag into your lap rare treasures that each believes to be the greatest.
Perhaps you are astonished at their gifts. But look into the blanket in your arms, how He already surpasses all of them.
Amber that is traded near and far, rings of gold and costly spices that drift for a moment on the air: these are quickly fading pleasures and leave behind a vague regret.
On December 21—the darkest night of the year—Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a very Advent message to the American Congress. Advent includes both an acknowledgement of our grim present and the promise of a transcendent future, and the Ukrainian president touched on both.
On the one hand, Zelensky pointed to Russia’s assault on Ukrainian civilians—and as if we needed further confirmation, the New York Times has just published new information about the Russian paratroopers who carried out wholesale slaughter in Bucha last spring. On the other hand, Zelensky reminded Americans of the higher ideals, which led them to stand up against the British in the 1770s and against the Nazis in the 1940s.
Some of the best Christmas poems are those which look at the grim times in which Jesus was born. Given the Bucha slaughter, my father’s poem “Witness” is very timely. In it, one of Herod’s soldiers refuses to participate in the slaughter of the innocents, which was to include Jesus.
Witness By Scott Bates
When it came down from HQ The order to shoot the kids We were stunned I mean really rocked And I remember saying Jesus we can’t do that and some of us Felt like walking out but you don’t do that In the army you don’t quit without a court-martial So that was it we had to do it And a lot of us did and it got very messy And not pretty at all but we had to follow orders You got to have discipline or you can’t do anything Except me I couldn’t bring myself to do it I couldn’t explain it I knew I was disobeying orders Maybe it was because I have three kids myself and one Of them is under two so when I found these poor people Hiding in a barn with a new baby I couldn’t do it I sure as hell couldn’t do it I told them to cool it hit the road take off For Egypt or somewhere and fast and not go back for anything I took off pretty fast myself because the rest of the patrol Was coming back and I would have got it for insubordination And no questions asked bothers I would have had it I mean for good But I’m not sorry I’m not sorry at all He was a cute kid I hope they made it
Meanwhile, at a time when almost three million Ukrainians have fled their country, Malcolm Guite’s sonnet “Refugee” reminds us that Jesus too was a refugee when his family fled the slaughter. Both poems put us in mind of the true Christmas spirit.
Refugee By Malcolm Guite
We think of him as safe beneath the steeple, Or cosy in a crib beside the font, But he is with a million displaced people On the long road of weariness and want. For even as we sing our final carol His family is up and on that road, Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel, Glancing behind and shouldering their load. Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled, The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power, And death squads spread their curse across the world. But every Herod dies, and comes alone To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.
Imagine the following blissful scenario. I build a roaring fire in our wood stove, treat myself to a glass of eggnog laced with a shot of whiskey, and settle down with a book about…narratology.
“Narratology?!” I hear you say.
To be more specific, I settle down with Yale Professor Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.
Actually, I don’t only read literary theory before said wood stove. Last week, in preparation for my talk on Charles Dickens’s Christmas stories, I settled down with A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Christmas Storms and Sunshine.” I’m not always a dry academic.
Still, I must admit that I’m enthralled with Brooks’s book, which touches on many of my own concerns. You’ll be hearing some ruminations on the book in forthcoming posts, but today I focus on one of the dangers that fiction poses. We live in an age, Brooks observes, where story is threatening to overwhelm reality. Concerned by how large swathes of our population are surrendering to QAnon conspiracy theories and claims about a stolen election, Brooks writes,
Swamped in story as we seem to be, we may lose the distinction between the two, asserting the dominion of our constructed realities over the real thing.
Brooks is particularly concerned by how authoritarians impose constructed realities upon populations. To make his point, he looks at the famous Jorge Luis Borges short story, “Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
The story is about a world that has been invented and snuck into pirated copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As Borges explains the caper, the project to invent an imaginary place is pushed and financed by an atheist American millionaire who, while not believing in God, “wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world.”
Unfortunately, in the story this fiction is so compelling that it starts to take over reality. Writing in 1947, the narrator notes that humans are easy marks for believing in Tlon since they have had recent practice in succumbing to the totalizing ideologies of communism and fascism:
Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlon, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we never quite grasp. Tlon is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
Tlon proceeds, therefore, to disintegrate the world of adherents, just as QAnon, Trumpist fabrications, and other authoritarian fantasies have done so in our own time. The narrator elaborates what’s involved in people submitting:
Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) “primitive language” of Tlon; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty—not even that it is false.
Brooks’s recurrent theme is that we must always remember that fiction is fiction. What Borges describes, by contrast,
is what happens when stories become myths: when their status as fictions, ficciones, is forgotten and they are taken as real explanations of the world, as something other than “as if” constructions, as the object of belief. On the basis of such fictions become myths we erect theologies. Very much including political theologies.
And then, in what works as a commentary on much contemporary political reporting, Brooks adds,
But even without that fearful and all too present outcome, we may find ourselves inertly accepting the notion that all is story, and that the best story wins.
In other words, if the political press does no more than report contending stories—as opposed to truth checking those stories—then it has surrendered to fiction. We would do well, Brooks says, to listen to Borges, who
put us on warning that we must remain critical of the all-encompassing claims of story. We need to oppose critical and analytical intelligence to narratives that seduce us into the acceptance of dominant ideologies. We need as listeners and readers to resist a passive narcosis of response.
In the book I have just completed, I differentiate between literature that speaks only to the passions (the heart) and literature that speaks to head as well as heart (and I add spirit as well). That distinction, I contend, is what differentiates great lit from not so great lit. Brooks is getting at something similar although he focuses more on the reader making ethical decisions (head decisions) than on the quality of the work itself.
But more on this in future posts. For the time being, it is noteworthy how dangerous unbridled fiction can be. Indeed, Brooks opens his book with a cynical line from Game of Thrones: “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” The observation is delivered by the dwarf Tyrion as he elevates Bran the Broken to the throne. We Americans have witnessed in our own recent history how far an unscrupulous man can go by relying upon nothing more than the fictions he tells.
This year’s winter solstice occurs at a time when the country anticipates a major blizzard, which promises to wreak havoc on holiday travel. For this bleak midwinter moment, here’s a bleak Robert Frost poem.
Forget about the loneliness of animals smothered by new snowfall, Frost tells us. And forget about feeling small when facing the vast reaches of interstellar space. If you want to truly scare yourself at the prospect of emptiness, you have but to look within.
Initially, I was puzzled by Frost’s symbolism. When I imagine staring into an inner abyss, normally I color it black, not white. It so happens, however, that my faculty group has been discussing Moby Dick, and Melville does something similar to Frost with the color white. In “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter, narrator Ishmael reports feeling a “nameless horror” at thoughts of Moby Dick before concluding that it was “the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” Later in the chapter he elaborates:
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper…
“[O]f all these things,” Ishmael concludes, “the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
I can well imagine Frost having this passage somewhere in his mind when he wrote his poem. Ahab’s quest is motivated not so much by revenge against the animal that deprived him of his leg but rather revenge against a universe that threatens to be about nothing more than death and annihilation. Similarly, for Frost, snow-covered nature proves to be nothing more than a metaphor for (borrowing from Ishmael) “the charnel-house within.”
George Richmond, 1851 portrait of Elizabeth Gaskell
Tuesday
Yesterday, I wrote about the enormous popularity of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol in 1843. Of course, whenever a publishing venture proves so popular, other authors will follow. One such story seems particularly applicable to today’s America: Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Christmas Storms and Sunshine,” written in 1848. (You can read it here.)
It’s applicable because it speaks to political polarization. With worker unrest on the rise, 1848 was a particularly volatile year. Revolutions broke out all over Europe, leading Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto. Although England itself didn’t experience a revolution, it was still a charged time, which may be one reason why Gaskell penned a story about two newspaper men, one Tory and one Radical, who happen to be next door neighbors. The story begins with an account of their newspaper rivalry:
In the town of —- (no matter where) there circulated two local newspapers (no matter when). Now the Flying Post was long established and respectable — alias bigoted and Tory; the Examiner was spirited and intelligent — alias new-fangled and democratic. Every week these newspapers contained articles abusing each other; as cross and peppery as articles could be, and evidently the production of irritated minds, although they seemed to have one stereotyped commencement, — ‘Though the article appearing in last week’s Post (or Examiner) is below contempt, yet we have been induced,’ &c., &c., and every Saturday the Radical shopkeepers shook hands together, and agreed that the Post was done for, by the slashing, clever Examiner; while the more dignified Tories began by regretting that Johnson should think that low paper, only read by a few of the vulgar, worth wasting his wit upon; however the Examiner was at its last gasp.
The story, however, focuses on the wives of the editors rather than the editors themselves. It so happens that the Tory wife has a cat but no children whereas the Radical wife has a child but no cat. That’s because, overwhelmed with motherhood responsibilities, she’s not always careful about keeping her larder carefully locked up, which makes it the target of the neighboring cat. Shortly after the story begins, said cat spoils the mutton she is serving for dinner.
This in turn causes the mother to beat the cat, thereby drawing upon herself the wrath of her neighbor.
I won’t go into all the various ways that the enmity is overcome but it involves the baby becoming ill, at which other points of contention fade into insignificance. By the end of the story, the two families are dining together. At one point, we see the Tory wife rocking the baby and the Radical wife stroking the cat.
At work, meanwhile, each man becomes more open-minded about the other. Now, they still don’t agree about their fundamental principles. But they don’t abuse each other to the extent they once did, leading Gaskell to conclude,
If any of you have any quarrels, or misunderstandings, or coolnesses, or cold shoulders, or shynesses, or tiffs, or miffs, or huffs, with anyone else, just make friends before Christmas, — you will be so much merrier if you do.
I ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night, on Bethlehem Heights.
At our church’s Sunday Forum yesterday, I talked about Charles Dickens’s vision of Christmas. While I pushed again the recent movie that contended that the novelist was “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” I did acknowledge that he helped to re-invent it. Of particular interest to me is how his view of Christmas evolved.
First, I noted that Christmas was alive and well 1000 years before Dickens came to it. The 9th century’s King Alfred, for instance, said that the Twelve Days of Christmas should be a time of celebration and no work.
To be sure Christmas, which probably has deep roots in both the Roman saturnalia and also in winter solstice celebrations, was banned by the British Puritans when they came to power in the 1640s. These religious purists, suspicious of the raucous feasting, ordered fasting to replace gorging. In a reverse blue law, shops were ordered to remain open on the day.
Charles II reestablished Christmas when he was restored to the monarchy, but the Puritan fear of wasteful extravagance never entirely went away. This became especially true when power shifted from the landed class to the mercantile class, with their Protestant work ethic. We see some of their language in Scrooge’s invective:
What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Later he tells Bob Cratchit that Christmas is an excuse for “picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”
In my talk I contended that a new emphasis on Christmas arose not only in reaction to the middle class focus on profit but also to industrialization, urbanization, and atomization. Suddenly there was nostalgia for the old gentry and their communal Christmas festivals. Dickens didn’t invent the new fervor but he did provide enduring and memorable narratives to go along with it. Let’s say that he supercharged Christmas.
In doing so, he harkened back (I’m pretty sure) to Joseph Addison’s description of Christmas, written 140 years earlier. The fabled editor of the Spectator reports a supposed conversation with Sir Roger de Coverley, a country squire who,
after the laudable custom of his ancestors, always keeps open house at Christmas. I learned from him that he had killed eight fat hogs for this season, that he had dealt about his chines very liberally amongst his neighbours, and that in particular he had sent a string of hog’s-puddings with a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish. “I have often thought,” says Sir Roger, “it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of the winter. It is the most dead, uncomfortable time of the year, when the poor people would suffer very much from their poverty and cold if they had not good cheer, warm fires, and Christmas gambols to support them. I love to rejoice their poor hearts at this season, and to see the whole village merry in my great hall. I allow a double quantity of malt to my small beer, and set it a running for twelve days to everyone that calls for it. I have always a piece of cold beef and a mince-pie upon the table, and am wonderfully pleased to see my tenants pass away a whole evening in playing their innocent tricks, and smutting [kissing?] one another. Our friend Will Wimble is as merry as any of them, and shows a thousand roguish tricks upon these occasions.”
Depictions of such Christian cheer show up in Dickens’s first works, Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, both published in 1836. What will change by 1843’s Christmas Carol is Dickens’s view of memory.
In his Sketches by Boz essay, Dickens wants to banish bad memories from the holiday:
Look on the merry faces of your children (if you have any) as they sit round the fire. One little seat may be empty; one slight form that gladdened the father’s heart, and roused the mother’s pride to look upon, may not be there. Dwell not upon the past; think not that one short year ago, the fair child now resolving into dust, sat before you, with the bloom of health upon its cheek, and the gaiety of infancy in its joyous eye. Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and contented heart. Our life on it, but your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one!
Note how, in trying to rid the holiday of such memories, Dickens brings special attention to them. And as we will see in Christmas Carol, the potential death of Tiny Tim—revealed by the Ghost of Christmas Future—is important is converting Scrooge. Dickens, in other words, evolves to a position that, rather than trying to banish past darkness, one should face up to it. If the miracle of Christ is that love triumphs over death, then death has to be acknowledged.
Indeed, the Ghost of Christmas Past can be seen as psychological scarring. We are haunted by past trauma, which threatens to blight our lives. Christmas is miraculous because it becomes a time, not to ignore our previous suffering, but to see it as co-existing with love and joy. Through our experiences with and knowledge of suffering, we are able to develop a deep sense of compassion.
In fact, in a later Christmas story Dickens shows what would happen if we were to blot out traumatic memories. In The Haunted Man, the protagonist has a spirit erase his mind, after which he evolves into—well—a haunted man:
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity,—but might have said he looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?
Only after a benign spirit reverses the wish and restores the man with memory does he develop a compassionate soul.
In my presentation, I noted how the great Christmas stories always feature darkness. I told the story of how, when my father, returning from World War II, attended Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life with my grandfather, my grandfather insisted on walking out of the film midway through because he found it too depressing. And indeed, the film is very dark—especially when George Bailey blows up at his family—which makes its Christmas ending all the more powerful. The same is true of film versions of A Christmas Carol, which I remember frightening me out of my wits when I saw them as a child.
In short, A Christmas Carol caught the public imagination and elevated Christmas because it wasn’t afraid to show images of death in its pages. Scrooge grapples with his mortality and, through that struggle, rediscovers his heart.
