A Tale of Two Cities

Scripture is the King James Version. Dickens is read from Project Gutenberg #98; the philosophers, Shelley and Lyte from public-domain texts; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is quoted with credit; Robert Hunter is paraphrased and credited, with a single phrase quoted in commentary.

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the best of times and the worst of times — the most famous opening sentence in the English language, and the quiet work going on underneath it.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

Charles Dickens was forty-seven years old and at the height of his powers when he wrote the sentence you are about to hear, and he was not a happy man. The book is A Tale of Two Cities. It is the shortest of his novels and the least like the others: almost no comedy, very few of the grotesques he is loved for, and a plot built like a trap.

He wrote it for a magazine he had just founded, and he put it in the first issue — the thirtieth of April, eighteen fifty-nine, the opening number of a weekly called All the Year Round. It ran there for thirty-one weeks, a few pages at a time, until the end of November. Readers took this book the way we take a television series: in instalments, with a week to wait.

The year before, his marriage of more than twenty years had ended. And two years before that, he had spent a season acting in a play by his friend Wilkie Collins, called The Frozen Deep, in the part of a man who loses the woman he loves to a rival and then dies to save that rival's life. Dickens said afterward that this was where the story first came to him — on a stage, in someone else's play, playing a man who gives his life for the man who has everything he wanted. He also said, of the history underneath it, that no one could hope to add anything to Carlyle's great book on the French Revolution, which he had read until it was part of him.

The story runs from seventeen seventy-five to the Terror. A doctor is released from the Bastille after eighteen years, out of his mind, and is brought home to a daughter who did not know he was alive. A French aristocrat renounces his name and his family's cruelty and goes to England to teach. And an English lawyer of great gifts, who has wasted every one of them and knows it, falls in love with the same young woman, loses her to the aristocrat, and eventually walks to the guillotine in his place, under his name.

But all of that is still ahead. The book opens on a road in a peaceful year, with none of it visible yet.

From Dickens, The Period:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

He goes on:

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

Things in general were settled for ever. Hold that line; the whole chapter is a slow answer to it.

Dickens spends the middle of the chapter showing us what that settled world was actually like. In England: a spiritualist ghost rapping out messages in a London lane and half the city believing it, a nation losing its American colonies, highwaymen robbing coaches on the open road, a hangman busy all week — thieves one day, forgers the next, a boy hanged for a trifle. In France: a young man put to a hideous death for failing to kneel to a passing procession of monks. That is the settled world. And then Dickens does something quiet and strange. He turns away from the loud rulers, and from the ghost and the gallows, and he looks at two figures nobody is watching, and gives them names.

From Dickens:

It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread.

And then he hands the whole proud age over to those two silent workmen, and ends the chapter:

Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures — the creatures of this chronicle among the rest — along the roads that lay before them.

The Woodman, Fate. The Farmer, Death. The trees for the guillotine are already growing. The carts for the tumbrils are already in the barn, with poultry roosting in them. And nobody hears a thing.

The storytellers who came after Dickens have names for what he is doing here. They call it dramatic irony — the moment when we, holding the book, know the thing the people inside the book do not. We have read the last chapter; they are still certain that things in general are settled for ever. And they call the growing trees and the waiting carts foreshadowing, and more precisely, the weapon shown early in the story that must be used before the end. Dickens has loaded an entire revolution into one sentence and left it, silent, in the corner of a peaceful year.

That silence is what we are chasing tonight, through older books than his: the age that cannot hear its own hour coming.

The oldest of them says it flattest of all. From Ecclesiastes: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

There is no new thing under the sun. Dickens said it in his own key — the period was so far like the present period. Every age is the best and the worst. Every age thinks its arrangements permanent. And the Preacher had numbered the doubleness of things, the best and the worst laid side by side in a row, long before Dickens set his own row down.

And the Preacher knew something else, which is that the felling is not an accident of the calendar. It is scheduled. From Ecclesiastes: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up. The Woodman's trees are still standing. They are still putting out leaves in the spring of seventeen seventy-five. Their time to be plucked up has not come — but it is set.

A philosopher of Ephesus had stood at exactly this paradox and made it his whole doctrine. Heraclitus taught that the world is not a set of settled things but a single ever-living fire, always turning, and that opposites are secretly one. The way up and the way down, he said, are one and the same. Cold things grow warm, the warm cools, the wet dries, the parched moistens. And most famously: you cannot step twice into the same river, for other and yet other waters are ever flowing on. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, surveying him, puts the heart of it plainly — that beneath a world of apparently constant change there is an underlying unity and measure. Best of times and worst of times are not two facts about seventeen seventy-five. They are one river, seen from its two banks.

A Roman emperor who was also a philosopher said the same thing to himself, alone, in a soldier's tent. From the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them. Think continually how many physicians are dead, after often knitting their brows over the sick; and how many astrologers, after predicting the deaths of others; and how many mighty men, after laying waste whole cities. All is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

All is ephemeral. And three centuries after him, a Roman senator sat in prison awaiting execution — himself a man for whom the wheel had abruptly turned — and wrote a dialogue in which Lady Fortune herself appears to answer his complaint. She does not apologise. She explains. From Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy: This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins. I delight to see the high come down and the low ascend. Mount up, if thou wilt, but only on condition that thou wilt not think it a hardship to come down when the rules of my game require it. Inconstancy is my very essence. Why then dost thou, O man, seek to fix upon me a permanence I have never had?

Inconstancy is my very essence. The lords of the loaves and fishes believed the wheel had stopped on them. It had not. It never stops.

That is the wisdom of the world at its clearest: unillusioned, exact, and a little cold. It can see the wheel turning perfectly well. What it cannot tell you is whose hand is on it. The Scriptures take the same turning wheel and put a hand on it. They do not call it Fortune, and they do not call it merely change. They call it an axe, and a harvest.

From the Gospel, in the words of John the Baptist, standing at the Jordan and looking straight at a religious establishment sure of itself: And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

The axe is laid unto the root. Dickens's Woodman is doing nothing new; he is an old figure, older than the guillotine by a very long way. And the Farmer's law gets named in a single line. From the letter to the Galatians: Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

The tumbrils in the barn are a crop. The Revolution will be a harvest of what the settled world had planted in its own cruelty.

And Scripture has a scene made for exactly this — a king certain of himself, boasting at the very hour of his fall. From the book of Daniel: At the end of twelve months Nebuchadnezzar walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon. The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty? While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. The same hour was the thing fulfilled.

While the word was in the king's mouth. He did not even finish the sentence about how settled it all was.

Now hear the same boast without the voice from heaven. An English poet stood in imagination before the wreck of another such king and carved the whole thing into fourteen lines. From Shelley, Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: and on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. That is Nebuchadnezzar's sentence in another language — is not this great Babylon, that I have built by the might of my power. Two kings, one boast. But only one of them is interrupted. Babylon's king gets a voice from heaven while the word is still in his mouth, and is told by name whose kingdom it actually was. Egypt's king gets nothing at all. No voice, no verdict, no witness: only weather, and four hundred miles of sand, and a stonecutter whose name we do not have either. That is the whole difference between the two cities we are talking about tonight, and it is carved on two pedestals.

Paul says the thing plainly to a young church, and his words could be printed under Dickens's first paragraph without changing a syllable of either. From the first letter to the Thessalonians: For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.

When they shall say, Peace and safety. There is Dickens's sentence exactly — things in general were settled for ever — set to the older music of judgment.

And the last book of the Bible gives the Farmer his harvest in full. From the Revelation: And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle. And another angel cried with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.

So the Woodman and the Farmer are not, finally, Fate and Death at all — or not only. Behind Dickens's pagan-sounding figures stands a moral universe that sows and reaps and weighs kingdoms in balances, and does not stop its wheel for the comfortable.

And that is why his book is called a tale of two cities — and why that title is older than Dickens by fourteen hundred years. For while one empire was falling and men were sure the world was ending, a bishop in North Africa sat down to write the largest answer anyone has ever given to "things settled for ever." He said there are not one but two cities running through the whole of history, mixed together in every age, and told apart only by what they love. From Augustine, The City of God: Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.

Two cities, formed by two loves. Dickens set London against Paris. Augustine set the City of Man against the City of God, and told us they are threaded through every London and every Paris, through seventeen seventy-five and through tonight. The lords of the loaves and fishes belonged to the city that glories in itself — and its wheel was already turning.

Job had said the plainest word of all about the men who build as if they will not die. From the book of Job: Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

And Moses, who had watched a whole generation fall in the wilderness, set the arithmetic of it down as a prayer. From the ninetieth Psalm: Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. In the morning they are like grass which groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. We spend our years as a tale that is told. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

We spend our years as a tale that is told.

Hold that. It is a small phrase and it has been sitting under this whole evening, waiting. Because if our years are a tale — then somebody is telling it. And every voice we have heard tonight has been, in one way or another, a teller. Heraclitus telling us the river. The emperor in his tent telling himself, at the end of a long day, that all of it is passing. Boethius in his cell telling us the wheel. And Dickens, telling the tale of a single year from the far end, where he already knows what the Woodman is for.

There is a songwriter nearer our own time who understood the teller's predicament better than most, and I want to bring him in here, because he says something we need. Robert Hunter, who wrote the words for a California band called the Grateful Dead, has a storyteller step into the middle of a tale — a sailor, a soldier, a lady, a fan thrown down into a lion's den — and then refuse, on purpose, to tell you who was right. The teller renders no verdict. His voice, he says, will soon be out of hearing. His office — and the phrase is Hunter's, and it is worth keeping — is to shed light, and not to master.

That is exactly right, and it is exactly the limit. It is true of every teller who is only a teller. Dickens did not make the year seventeen seventy-five. He did not plant the trees in Norway or park the carts in the barn. He arrived eighty-four years late with a pen and found it all already done, and his whole genius was to notice, and to hold a lamp up to it, and then to fall silent — and his voice did go out of hearing, the way Hunter said it would. He shed light. He did not master. He could not. It was never his story.

But hear the sermon a man preached in Athens, to a city full of philosophers — the same city, the same lineage, the grandfathers of half the voices we have read tonight. He does not tell them their poets were fools. He quotes their poets back to them. From the Acts of the Apostles: God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

He hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.

There is the answer to the whole evening. Seventeen seventy-five was an appointed time. So was seventeen eighty-nine. So is tonight. The lords of the loaves and fishes were not standing on a floor that happened to hold; they were standing inside a sentence, in the middle of somebody's paragraph, and the paragraph was going somewhere.

And here is the thing I most want you to carry to bed. Dickens wrote the Woodman and the Farmer with a pen, on paper, and they are figures — magnificent ones, and only figures. But the trees were real trees. The carts were real carts, with real mud dried on the wheels and real poultry roosting in them, standing in a real barn in a real year, while a real king with a large jaw slept badly in a real palace. Dickens found that. He did not invent it. Someone had written it already — and he wrote it in the ink of reality. That is the difference between the finest novelist of his century and the God he was, without entirely meaning to, describing. One of them works in words. The other works in trees, and weather, and harvests, and empires, and the hour of your death and mine.

And now a careful thing, because the ink is real and so is the blood. He is not the author of the cruelty. The tumbrils were not his invention. They were a crop, and the seed was in the hands of men who sowed it — that is what we have been saying all night: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. What is written into the grain of the world is not the wickedness. It is the harvest. That a thing sown comes up. That the wheel turns. That the proud come down, and a settled age is never as settled as it tells itself. The cruelty was ours. The reckoning is his.

Which is why the one Teller is not held by the teller's limit. Hunter is right about everyone who is only a teller: shed light, do not master, stand aside, because the tale was never yours. But there is One of whom that is not true — because he is not recounting somebody else's events. He is not reporting the story. He is writing it, and he is inside it, and it is about him. He may master it and not be a tyrant, for the same reason a man may do as he pleases in his own field. He sheds light and he masters, and with him the two are one act.

And Hunter's teller admits at the last that the ending never does get told. That is why we pay him, and hope he will come back. Hear what the sermon in Athens does with that. From the Acts: because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

The end has been told. That is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. It was not guessed at and it was not hinted; it was published in advance, and the assurance given to all men was an empty tomb. And the Teller is coming back.

The words he tells it in will outlast the thing he tells it about. From Isaiah: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. And from the Lord himself: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

That is the one fixed point in an age of change, and it is where we lay the night down. We close with a hymn written by a dying man. Henry Francis Lyte wrote it in the last weeks of his life, and it answers a whole age of change with the one thing that does not change.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. When other helpers fail, and comforts flee, help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changest not, abide with me.

I need thy presence every passing hour; what but thy grace can foil the tempter's power? Who, like thyself, my guide and stay can be? Through cloud and sunshine, O abide with me.

Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes; shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies; heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee; in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

Sleep well. The story is not yours to finish; it is his, and he has already said how it ends. Good night.