Reading notes

A Tale of Two Cities begins with a famous quote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was a wise year, it was an obscure year; it was a time of confidence, it was a time of doubt ...... All of us are in helicopter heaven, all of us are going straight down to hell. "

 

This passage has been widely recited and has long transcended national boundaries, but what is it like to have the good and the bad coexist? I can understand the "obscurity, the doubts, the darkness, the despair and the nothingness. ......" If Dickens felt that "that time and this time are so similar," then I The tragic end of the spectrum is a bit more empathetic.

 

Every day when I turn on the news, from the reports to the readers' reactions, there is anger and sorrow - and mostly anger. People express their feelings in violent language, as if they have no hope that communication is possible. Those who are bullied think that heaven belongs to the powerful, but they don't know that there is darkness there too. Too much news takes my breath away.

 

After reading the novel I found another sentence at the end, much less well-known in comparison: "What I have done now is far more beautiful than anything I have ever done; the rest I shall have is far sweeter than anything I have ever known." --what kind of faith is needed to say in these times, "What I have done is better than all I have done," and what kind of hope is needed to dare to look toward an unknown rest?

 

Dickens described the eve of the French Revolution, England and France were shrouded in the fog of dusk, in England, people left their homes and had to send their furniture to the warehouses of furniture companies for safekeeping; ordinary merchants who traded by day became road robbers by night; the most vicious murderers and thieves who stole sixpence received the same capital punishment.

 

France was even more terrible. The rulers and the church were extremely corrupt, hatred between people was like poisonous gas in all corners of society, and terror was brewing rapidly. All this was, in Hugo's writing, the darkness before the dawn - the blood and tears of the night were negligible for the sake of the dawn. There are always too many people who are enemies, and friends, friends are just a vacant seat, you dare not say who can sit on it in the next moment, even for yourself you are not sure.

 

Under this pressure, many writers can hardly escape the temptation to write about revolution, because the injustice is so obvious that there is no way out for the powerful and the powerless, much like our news today - in fact as a Chinese, I have read many things about revenge for blood, but I am not familiar with how to die with a smile.

 

To avenge a blood feud or to extinguish an enmity, that is exactly the story Dickens was going to tell, his Tale of Two Cities. At first I thought the twin cities referred only to Paris and London, but soon some small characters take the stage, insignificant but concrete, tearing away the labels of the twin cities and blurring the lines between Paris and London.

 

In Paris, we met some ragged, idle-looking people called "Jacques" who gathered in small groups in small hotels, wondering what was brewing. The owner of the hotel, De Fazi, was busy, but not for business. Mrs. De Fazi does not raise her eyes to do knitting work, but on the hidden matters, on certain things that smell of blood, she knows everything and is involved, her face is as hard as stone, even men feel cold when they see her.

 

The city, on the one hand, the aristocrats who live in luxury on the bones of the poor, whose carriages barge through the markets, killing people and leaving them with a few dollars, and on the other hand, the destitute who have a dark future, and then there are these "yakuza" who sneak into the houses of the adults at night and kill one, and Mrs. De Fazi crosses out the knitting from her hand. "I don't know which is easier or more difficult: to cross out a person's name or his life.

 

Dickens's revolutionaries are not abstract, they are mostly sufferers transformed into perpetrators of violence, at first perhaps out of fear or hatred, but later uniformly abandoning their family names for the sake of "justice" and donning the mantle of "Jacques" the executioner. For Dickens, no matter what the reason for the revolution, the essence of the revolution remains the same, that is, the taking of human life, the cause is blood, the result is still blood, and one of the two cities thus rises from the blood. So where is the other city?

 

Unlike the banner of Paris, Dickens described the violent scene of the sea, his eyes turned and fixed on an inconspicuous boat among the waves: here is a French doctor Manet, who was imprisoned for 18 years, was brought to London by his best friend and daughter Lucy after his release, but fell into mental illness; Lucy lost both parents at an early age for this reason, her husband Danet is the descendant of a French nobleman, because he felt that the nobility was unjust to the poor Her husband Danet, a descendant of a French aristocrat, was sentenced to death twice because he felt that his nobility was unjust to the poor.

 

Who are the people in this boat? Some suffering people, just like the city. Somehow, these people, who also had a national grudge, were not caught up in the whirlpool of that city - they had no ambition but to live their lives in peace with each other. However, the harshness of an era means that, whether you want to fight or not, there is always something to destroy the life to come from behind.

 

When Danai first got into trouble with the law, the man who helped him win the lawsuit was a man of similar age to him, even in appearance. The man's name was Caton, a heavy drinker, used to self-deprecation, and had an eccentric self-loathing. He was willing to play second fiddle to a talentless lawyer who repeatedly wasted his years because of his addiction to alcohol and his refusal to play nice, but suffered for it.

 

There are several film versions of A Tale of Two Cities, and I find that in all of them Carton is the hero and a favorite of female audiences. I suspect that he is mostly made into a late-blooming hero, while in the book, everything is done to express the contradiction. It is true that Carton is handsome, but this appearance has been depleted by alcohol and long-term self-opposition; his lack of talent, rather than moving people to say that people feel shame, because he can not fight but will secretly mourn; he is very affectionate to Lucy, he confessed, not to win love but to declare hopelessness, and asked for mercy: "When you see the same beautiful little baby as you bouncing around your knees, I hope you can sometimes remember that there is such a person in the world who is willing to sacrifice his life in order to preserve the life of your loved one!"

 

In real life, there is no halo for people like Catton, because people mostly fear and hate incompetent people who have lost their fighting spirit, like his boss who proudly says to him, "See how I used to do it? How I do it now? Your way of dealing with the world is always a lame way."

 

Dickens wrote about this thread in so many vague strokes, and sometimes shelved it for a while, that I couldn't connect it to what happened in Paris for a long time. I don't understand why he wrote about the trivial life of such a group of people. In the atmosphere of the Revolution, it is always difficult for a small family to stand, because "an Englishman's home is his fortress" has lost its legitimacy. What is legitimate? At first it seemed to be justice.

 

Mrs. De Farge grew up to be a goddess of vengeance and a revolutionary leader not because of anything else, but because her family had died at the hands of the Marquis. She did have a reason for her hatred, but was there a reason for her determination to cut the family down to size? Is it justified to deduce from her experience that all rival classes should die? And finally, what is this strange justice that things have developed to the point where anyone who opposes the revolution, or even disagrees with her - all have to lose their heads?

 

"From her early childhood, she had been wronged and had a deep hatred for the rival class, and when the time came, she gradually became a tigress. She has no compassion." Dickens said that many women were "horribly changed" by the trend of the times.

 

I can't help but marvel that novelists of that time still had the ambition to take on difficult questions. The Revolution, in Hugo's view, was the rise of the people, although in Les Miserables it is rather unclear who is considered "the people". If the privileged class is not worthy of being the people because of their sins, does it follow that the oppressed must have clean hands? Who gives one person the right to take another's life? The "Jacques" have transformed into a large group, and the guillotine gives them power, so are they still the people, the new tyrants who have grown up in a pool of blood?

 

Hugo saw the revolution as a force to sweep away the darkness, while in Dickens' writing, the Revolution was one of the "countless insatiable and insatiable demons created by human imagination", and the symbol of the Revolution was the guillotine, which, interestingly, Dickens did not discuss, but only gently said. "It replaces the cross."

 

The cross. This is just another of their more than seventeen hundred years of tradition against the guillotine, a tradition that originated from a man who supposedly never had anything to do with sin and who did not wrong anyone. In order to prove that love does not count the evil of men and that life is better than death - he went out of his way to suffer poverty, humiliation, humiliation, death, and was hung on the cross without complaint, and if he wanted to collect his debt, all those who stood under the cross would not be spared, yet before he died he simply said: "Father forgive them for what they have done they do not know."

 

Hugo mentions Jesus as if he were one of the heroes, the embodiment of some noble spirit, inspiring more people to win glory by their own efforts; Dickens mentions Jesus, always when someone's heart is broken or someone is dying, and he himself died for people and rose again, and became a comfort and hope in the hearts of countless people who were bound to die. Dickens insisted on this belief in all his novels, and used it to break the iron barrel of this seemingly impermeable world.

 

Thus, the previously hidden threads come to the fore: Danet returns to Paris at the most dangerous moment, and is himself condemned to death in order to save the housekeeper who is persecuted for serving their family. Manette and Lucy, together with their servants and best friends - a group of five people - do not hesitate to follow them to France and share Darnay's plight. Caton also came to Paris for Lucy's sake. The boat seemed fragile, defenseless in the face of the violence that was about to overwhelm it, like the hayseeds who were once unable to resist the great carts, dogs, and guillotines of the lords; and like the lords of today who have become a blade of grass when they are guillotined.

 

What can a group of people without force do? Dickens again mentioned that Carton and Darnay look alike, and Carton seems to be Darnay's version of not being ambitious. The message is warlike. How is an unarmed person going to save another person who is bound to die? Some, with one kind of death instead of another.

 

By this point, I suddenly felt that Dickens had pushed hope so low in the first half of the story, just to bring it up at the last moment. It challenges humanity. Why does Carton want to die for Darnay? This man was so much like him, yet everything was far superior. Why did Carton want to die for Darnay? Darnay died, and maybe Lucy will be his one day. We can easily understand the revolutionary mindset, but it is hard to appreciate the sacrifice.

 

Carton decided to die in place of Darnay because he loved Lucy, and he chose to love what she loved. He secretly arranged to plan and prepare the most thorough protection for that small boat to sail to safety. He used his wisdom, rescued from alcohol and remorse, to make it last, in the service of love.

 

Darnay, unaware of all this, said to Lucy: "I will give my beloved a parting blessing. We will be reunited again in the place where the troubled have rest!" On the other hand, Miss Poulos, the servant of the Manetts, fights to the death with Mrs. De Farge in order to stop her from catching up with the doctor's family, and Dickens gives her the words, "Love is always much more powerful than hate."

 

And what about Catton? What did this man, who went alone to his death, get? "Jesus said, "The resurrection is in me, and the life is in me. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he rise again. Whoever lives and believes in me will never die."

 

Before his execution, Caton met a poor seamstress who had been misjudged by the revolutionary committee. They accompanied each other like passengers who had been seated for the journey to the end. She said to him.

 

 "Dear stranger, if it were not for you, I would not be so calm, for I was born a poor little man, cowardly as it is. ...... The thought of the Lord, who was put to death, has made it possible for us to be here today still with hope and comfort. I feel that you were given to me from heaven."

 

These, then, were the sources of courage that the men in the little boat used to resist the storm. They do not want to die, if they can, they would like to spend the journey together in peace. However, they are not afraid if they really want to die, because they believe that pain and death is not all, there is a real and beautiful country waiting at the end of the world, that is the eternal home. They did not have to rob and sweep anyone away from them to get there, but by loving each other, they could say by faith.

 

"What I have done now is far better than all that I have done; and the rest I shall obtain is far sweeter than all that I have known."