Quote of the Day: On the Chains We Make (Or Don’t)

I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it–Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

First off, Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens!  He was born 212 years ago,** on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth,  England and he died a mere fifty-eight years later in the county of Kent.

A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843, was an immediate best-seller, and by the end of 1844, had worked its way through thirteen editions.

Today’s quote comes from the ghost of Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge’s late business partner.  Marley died about seven years before the story opens, and, after a series of short Christmas-Eve vignettes describing Scrooge’s ill-humor, and his greedy, and ungenerous temperament, Marley’s ghost appears as a cautionary figure.

Marley, who recognizes in Scrooge many of his own mercenary, avaricious, and predatory behaviors warns Scrooge that he’ll have one chance to free himself from his friendlessness and soullessness, and that he can do so only by listening to the three spirits of Christmas who will attend him–one a night, for the next three nights–else he (Scrooge) will live out the rest of his life self-absorbed, miserable and alone, after which he, too, will suffer in the afterlife the “incessant torture of remorse,” and find himself “doomed to wander through the world…and witness what [he] cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

It’s a great metaphor, this one of the chains we forge for ourselves, at the same time as we often blame others for our grievances and our unhappiness in life.

It reminds me of a favorite modern poem (I don’t often put those three words in such close proximity), Love Song: I and Thou, by Alan Dugan.  It’s an angry poem, one in which a man tries to find someone to blame for the mess he’s made of his life through the metaphor of building a house:

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots.

I have so been there, both when it comes to house-building, and in life.

He blames life.  He blames God. He even blames (it appears) his wife.  And then, along the way, there’s this:

                              This is hell,
but I planned it. I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.

A grim admission of the chains he’s forged for himself.

It’s a fine little poem, one my late husband and I committed to memory during the building of our own home.  The opening line, “Nothing is plumb, level, or square,” might have been written for the edifice we created for ourselves.  (Maurits Escher, call your office.)  That’s where the resemblance ends, though.  We never “spat rage’s nails/into the frame-up of [our] work,” and never, ever did we experience the time when it:

                         settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment.  Then
It screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way.

Forty years on (it’ll be forty years next year since we sold our house in Pittsburgh, moved into a tent in a field in Washington County, and started to dig the foundation, it’s still standing.  And not even remotely shaky.  A metaphor, not for the catastrophes and disasters that regularly bedeviled our life together (most of them not of our own making), but a refuge and a shelter from the storm, and a testament to what two independent, strong-willed, secure, committed, people can accomplish together if neither places chains, or even just limits, on the other to hold him back.

**Many thanks to an attentive reader for correcting my arithmetical mistake.  I’ve never pretended math is my strong suit, unless you want a materials estimate for a home renovation project, or if you need to know how many miles of high-tensile 12-gauge wire you need for the perimeter of your farm fence.  There, I’m quite good.  Other stuff?  Hopeless.