A Tale of Two Cities

I hope you all watched wishbone growing up. If you didnʼt you really missed out. Well
most of what I knew about Charles Dickensʼ A Tale of Two Cities I knew from Wishbone
and even that I remember very faintly. Their rendition was made all the more confusing
because a key in the book is that there are two men who look almost identical, but in the
Wishbone rendition one role is played by an man, and his doppelganger is played by
Wishbone (a dog), so I didnʼt realize they were supposed to look a like.


I just finished reading the book the first time. Absolutely brilliant. Charles Dickensʼ way
of introducing and developing characters and weaving their lives through each othersʼ is
fascinating. The incredible evil during the French Revolution is so vivid and so near,
both in time and space, just a few generations removed from us, one country away from
me where my cousin is now studying fashion (or actually just finished). Itʼs so hard to
imagine living under such oppression, leading to so much revenge and bloodshed, and
yet on this very planet, just out of earshot from most of us, there are still similar things
going on.


Another theme throughout the book is living a life that was worth it, not wasted,
remembered by posterity, unselfish, quiet heroism. We always feel though like such
acts of courage are of another time because none of my friends are on their way to La
Guillotine, but as noted just a paragraph earlier, Iʼm fairly sure that there are
opportunities in this world for us to risk our lives to make life better for those that are
suffering. It would really be a shame to come to the end of life and realize you had
been pretending that everything was good and just, and that no innocent were dying, or
poor were starving while your eyes were closed to it. In the story is seems so blatant,
as the Marquis de Monseigneur runs over a baby with his carriage and he drops $50 to the parents and
continues on his way to his summer cottage built of the oppression of the town in the
valley below it, whom he has taxed to itʼs starvation. Every luxury he has comes at the
expense of the abused. In our case we have a few layers of middle men to buffer us
from the poor that support our needs, but itʼs there nonetheless, and in our day of world
wide communication at our fingertips, ignorance is not an excuse.


Work hard and be profitable, but not to your own end. Pull those up underneath you
who have allowed you to rise in the first place and have woven your shoelaces by hand.
Sorry for getting all intense. Iʼm really scolding myself first and foremost. Read the
book to yourself, and keep some of those thoughts in mind. Even if it doesnʼt bring you
to the same place, it is at the very least brilliant literature and you wonʼt have lost
anything by reading it.


Iʼm still trying to figure out how this post fits with my post on JOY. I donʼt support living
in wretched misery so that you can save all the worldʼs poor (though I may come to that
conclusion before long, who knows?).


“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.” - that would be a good sentence to finish my life with I think.