One of the greatest tales ever told
I had read an abridged and illustrated edition of A Tale of Two Cities when I was small. Over the last few years, whenever this work came to mind, two words would spontaneously come along – courage and self-sacrifice. I did not remember any characters barring two and I hardly remembered the plot. But whatever I had read back then had got distilled into the two words aforesaid.
A Tale of Two Cities follows the lives of a few people caught in the midst of the French Revolution of 1789. The men, and the beautiful young lady, would not have been so condemned and their lives in such a predicament, in any other time, their actions remaining the same, had the blood of the locals not been infused with the frenzy of the revolution. Public mood, so easily manipulatable even in times of peace, took such an extreme dualist form, with butchery in one breath and compassion in the next, that even the smallest and most forgotten details of the character’s lives came back to haunt them.
Some of the most glorious parts of the text come when Dickens compares the surge of people to a wave – rising and falling, ebbing and flowing. The imagery is beautiful, and one can almost imagine seeing that group of thousands of people slowly swaying to the tunes of the words of Dickens. They rise and fall, driven by an energy that feeds off the last vestiges of life left in them, for their liberty, equality and fraternity.
The beauty of any Dickensian work lies in the sheer planning that goes into the development of the plot. Every small detail is planned and developed at just the right pace (and place) so that towards the end, it all comes together beautifully. I can gauge two reasons for the success of A Tale of Two Cities, not only when it was released but even to this day. Apart from, obviously, brilliantly portraying Paris of the time, the novel manages to capture the individual human stories and feelings really faithfully. These could be two among many reasons why it is the best-selling novel in history.
This is the importance of classics, especially more so in today’s post-modern world where “every emotion and every feeling has already been expressed”. Paradoxically, we live in a time of scarcity of time. People want their demands to be met in an instant, modern means of communication like sms and emails have reduced the average number of vowels being used in words and some words and expressions are gradually dying out as they are supposedly too clichéd and anachronistic.
But those who read classics experience a bygone age when the real beauty of language was communicated to the reader, who would relish it and wait for the next offering (many of Dickens’ works were published in magazines in monthly instalments).
Using up paragraphs to convey or reflect on a feeling, long sentences to express one’s inner state, not only because fewer words were incapable, but also because the listener was intently engaged, flowery feelings that took a page to settle in, and which grew in silence, all these and much more can we find in the literary magic of these pages, much like other books written in that time. That the modern reader may not be able to relate with them is all the more reason to dwell in their beauty.
Slow down. Take a deep breath and read this book. Experience what it feels to see an atmosphere, an environment, a whole country slowly take form in front of your eyes!
The world will always ask you to hurry up, it will always demand more information in fewer words, in lesser time. But if you choose to always abide to these demands, then you will be losing out on more, than them.