I am trying to write an essay about A Christmas Carol, but students and colleagues keep interrupting. They pop in to ask about classes, committee work, last night’s Thunder game. I don’t have time to talk. I’m trying to write about what is wrong with Ebenezer Scrooge, but instead I am just getting grumpy.
Of course, everybody knows what’s wrong with Scrooge. It’s greed, right? Even if you haven’t read the book, you’ve seen the cartoon duck swimming in a giant vat of gold coins. We all agree that greed is Scrooge’s problem. The primary object of that greed, however, is not money. What Ebenezer Scrooge is greedy with is himself.
Just as I finish the paragraph above, a student comes into my office to ask about some sources for a paper on medieval allegory. Why didn’t I close the office door? I don’t say that, of course. I get up from my desk and pull C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love and Umberto Echo’s Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages from the shelf. I chat with her about Dante and her thesis. I try to remember that I am glad this student is interested in the Divine Comedy, that this is what I am here to do: light fires of interest in the beautiful and permanent things. Part of me, however, just wants to get back to writing. Part of me is greedy.
I’m a little Scrooge at times. Maybe most people are. We want to keep ourselves for ourselves. I hate to admit that, because this is how Dickens describes his famous miser:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which not steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days, and didn’t thaw in one degree at Christmas.
Scrooge is covetous, sure, but he is also “self-contained” and “solitary.” Solitude is not a bad thing, necessarily. Sometimes I just need to close the office door and get in some reading or writing. We need time for contemplation, for reading, for prayer. To be as “solitary as an oyster,” however, would suggest that there is a point at which our isolation starts to eat away at our humanity. In the Politics, Aristotle famously asserts that a man who cannot live among other men must be either something more than a man or something less. The comparison to an oyster would suggest that, in Dickens’s view, solitude makes us decidedly less than the full human creation we were meant to be, especially that form of solitude practiced habitually in the presence of others.
In the middle of the last paragraph another student arrives. This time my office door is shut, but he peers in to see me writing at my desk and stares until I get up to open the door. He is excited to tell me that he is going to Oxford with my Honors study abroad group this summer. I tell him I am glad to have him on board, but I am clearly irritated by the interruption. After he leaves, I look around for something to tape over the small window in my office door. It’s either cover the window or start shouting “humbug” at anyone who interrupts my writing time. It would be better for my soul just to cover the window. The need for unbroken concentration and occasional quiet to do the work of reading and writing amid the overly scheduled busyness of the modern university, an institution whose ostensible aim is the life of the mind, is no evil. I am alarmed, however, by the dislike that builds up in my heart for those who keep interrupting me. That, not the need for quiet working time, is what could potentially warp my soul.
Dickens allegorizes this danger in the strange eschatology of A Christmas Carol, a feature generally left out of popular film adaptations. When Jacob Marley visits Scrooge, it is not just to warn him of his own potential end but also to educate him about the moral reasoning behind it:
“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”
Travel is, of course, a wonderful and proverbially “broadening” thing, but the real point of Marley’s description of the afterlife is not the good of changing locations. The point, rather, is the good of being among our fellow human beings. In Dantesque fashion, in the afterlife of the warped soul the crime becomes the punishment, as the dead who have been stingy with themselves are doomed to be among but not with their human fellows for all eternity. Scrooge objects that Marley was always a good “man of business,” to which Marley retorts, “Mankind was my business.” It seems Marley has been found guilty of minding his own business, in the typical sense, which is not minding his true business at all in the greater sense. Such a sin, no doubt, involves keeping one’s money, but the description of the punishment suggests that it more fundamentally involves keeping oneself.
Early in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge refuses Fred’s invitation to dinner. How many meals with friends, colleagues, and students have I passed up in a desire to get just a little more work done? How many miserly granola bars have I eaten at my desk while battering away at some, likely self-imposed, deadline? Sure, there is work to do. But there is always work to do. I am reminded now, as I regretfully think back on missed opportunities, of Frost’s “A Time to Talk.” The poem offers the perspective of an anti-Scrooge:
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
I can’t find in this poem any of that frequent Frostian steely irony that might let me off the hook. It seems to mean what it says. The poem lacks irony, but it doesn’t lack tension. The speaker’s report of what he doesn’t do suggests, at the least, that the more miserly reaction crosses his mind. It may very well be what he would like to do. The use of plod suggests as much, a trudging rather than an eager and brisk walk. He wills himself, however, to walk to the edge of the field and visit with the friend, an act of determination, a stoicism of friendliness. Yet the visit is friendly, not brusque, not rude, not rushed. I suspect that what happens as the farmer forces himself to share himself is that he is being formed into a friend. He is being made a better man by the interruption.
Although the speaker clearly has more time than he thinks for visits, the poem is titled “A Time to Talk,” not simply “Time to Talk.” The use of the article suggests that Frost means a specific time. Reflecting on A Christmas Carol, I wonder if the time Frost has in mind is our living years. The time to talk is this life. That is the lesson Scrooge’s Christmas Eve ghosts teach him: that he must accept that this life is a time to talk before his soul is warped beyond recognition in what comes after.
In one of the most joyful endings in English literature, it is apparent that Scrooge learned that this life is a time to talk. Dickens says, “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.” Scrooge’s change of heart is a situating into a context. He becomes part of a community and of a polity. No longer an oyster, he has become a man.
If Scrooge can be saved from hoarding himself, so can I. I will still close the door to write and to read. After all, this is also a time to talk with Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Frost himself, and reading takes quiet sometimes to the point of solitude. But I will also practice giving myself more freely to others. I will stick my handle down in the mellow earth and trod until the walking comes easily.
Image Credit: John Leech, “Marley’s Ghost” (1843) via Wikimedia Commons.
