The Revenant
He awoke....no longer alone.
"Who's there? who are you, what do you want with me?
The shape began to move silently into his room,
noiselessly gliding towards him…
It approached.
.
He felt a damp chilling draught approach with it-
And a chilling of his body.
The miasma of his Soul
.
"Are you a Spirit?" He asked it. It didn't speak.
It hovered-
a dusky flame of darkness.
He began to feel fear. ..
.
It reached a hand towards him:
"I am the Ghost of your Morality.…
The lost Revenant of your Courage-
The shutting-door of your Humanity..."
.
"Take my hand." It said
"And walk. Back towards your Mercy,
And forward to your Destiny, and to your own Freedom"
.
He arose, an old man
He placed his hand into it's Coldness.
He stepped forward-
into his own Grace
The Revenant, a poem by Angmar
.
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The Craziness of A Christmas Carol
In the first ten sentences of a short book about Christmas, Charles Dickens used the words "undertaker," "mourners," "burial," "coffin," "deadest" and "unhallowed." It doesn't end there. In those same ten sentences—which were short sentences for Dickens—he managed to squeeze in the word "dead" four times! In the eleventh sentence, there's another "dead." Who gets away with that in a Christmas tale?
It's like a children's story about ducks and ponies and murder.
The twelfth sentence has a "dead" in it. The paragraph it shares has a "funeral," a "sad event," a "dreadfully" and another "mourner." What does that look like in black and white and yellow? See for yourself >
Why? Dickens explains in the fourth full paragraph with yet another "dead":
“There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”
You will be dead soon; you've one short chance to be a decent human being. He is teaching us how to be moral in the same way we learn multiplication tables. Now repeat that to yourself again and again and again and again. If it still doesn't take, he'll send along four ghosts because nobody learns anything from one.
The Ridiculousness of A Christmas Carol
A delicious secret to A Christmas Carol is how Charles Dickens decided to tell the story. You may have noticed it in the quotation we've already used:
“There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”
The narrator assumes the comfortable air of a storyteller sitting by an English fireplace with flames dancing in the background that punctuate the tale with unanticipated pops and crackles and phizzes. The narrator tells us this about Scrooge's late partner Jacob Marley:
“Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years.”
What does that tell you about our host? The average narrator is a trivia savant and would know that Scrooge and Marley had been partners for precisely thirty-six years, eight months and six days. But Dickens wanted you to feel comfortable around his narrator, who was a regular guy or gal with no mind for details.
Compare the narrator to Scrooge.
Just a couple of pages after our narrator had revealed a slightly vague knowledge of the partnership between Scrooge and Marley, Scrooge tells the two liberal gentlemen soliciting for charity, “[Jacob Marley] died seven years ago, this very night.”
We are to be comfortable with our narrator. Watch out for Scrooge!
The technique continues as our jolly host describes a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past:
”The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face-to-face with the unearthly visitor who drew them; as close to it as I am to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”
Not only do you have a friendly and down-to-earth narrator, but your friendly and down-to-earth narrator is a ghost! Another clue is found on the first page of the novella, as Dickens describes the “unhallowed hands” of his storyteller. Counting our host and the illustrations, that makes twelve ghosts introduced to you in the first chapter of a story about Christmas.
Nothing’s better for the Christmas Spirit than a Christmas spirit, said only Charles Dickens.
The Wonderfulness of A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol is about transformation. A change in a person so dramatic it has fired imaginations for 176 years. I believe that Charles Dickens wrote literature’s greatest fictional transformation because he was witness to the single greatest transformation in human history.
That inconceivable metamorphosis happened to a little girl named Laura Bridgman.
Laura Bridgman’s family fought a death struggle with Scarlet Fever. It killed two of Laura’s siblings. At the age of two, Laura was rendered blind and deaf and remained bed-ridden for months. The tiny girl was condemned to a dark and soundproof cell.
It was a life sentence.
Samuel Gridley Howe took Laura to his institute in Boston at the age of eight and spent a great deal of time with her, finally falling upon the concept of using objects that Laura could hold and feel while she felt the names of those objects written in raised letters on paper labels. One day understanding illuminated her face. The first words that Laura Bridgman learned were “spoon” and “key.”
She then demanded to know the words for everything.
Half a century before Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, the single greatest transformation of a human being took place at the Perkins Institute in Boston. Laura Bridgman joined our world. Charles Dickens visited with her and her instructor in 1842. He was inspired to write “that an Immortal soul might be awakened.”
Charles Dickens also wrote this at the end of his description of Laura Bridgman in his nonfiction book American Notes:
"Ye who have eyes and see not, and have ears and hear not; ye who are as the hypocrites of sad countenances, and disfigure your faces that ye may seem unto men to fast; learn healthy cheerfulness, and mild contentment, from the deaf, and dumb, and blind!"
I believe that Laura Bridgman lives inside A Christmas Carol. Is it a coincidence that, a year after personally witnessing the greatest actual human transformation, Charles Dickens wrote a book that bestowed upon the world its greatest fictional transformation?