Books We Love Insider Blog: Charles Dickens Had It Right by Gail Roughton

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Charles Dickens Had It Right by Gail Roughton

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." So begins one of the most iconic masterpieces of all time, A Tale of Two Cities. Many a high school student has groaned over its pages, including me, but one thing I didn't groan over was the opening paragraph, because even at fourteen--or at least I think I was fourteen, I'm pretty sure I was in the ninth grade, anyway--I actually understood what Dickens was getting at. It's as true now as it was in the year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred Seventy-Five, the year cited by Dickens, and the older I get the more I recognize how aptly Dickens described life in that first short paragraph of the first chapter of the novel.

All anyone has to do is turn on the news to be immediately regaled with stories of war, famine, serial killers, epidemics and man's general inhumanity to man. And intertwined with those stories are updates on medical advancement in the treatment of devastating diseases, of teenagers starting a community garden to supply local food banks with fresh produce, of a couple who foster and adopt babies and children with lifespan-limiting and debilitating disabilities, of First Responders and EMS volunteers rushing to rescue people and animals struggling to stay alive in the face of and aftermath of natural disasters, and Lord knows there've been plenty of them this year.

In other words, there's tons of Bad with a capital B running rampant in the world right now. But there's also plenty of Good with a capital G running right alongside of it. Personally, I think that's the natural balance of the world. I think sometimes Bad tips the scale really, really far over, until it seems impossible Good can ever tip the scale back on an even keel again, but it always has in the past, giving us hope that it always will in the future. Or in Dickens' words, it's always simultaneously the best of times and the worst of times and it always will be.

But this is just me talkin', and I'm certainly no authority on too much of anything other than my own little personal world (which is set in a small little country town, just like Turkey Creek in Country Justice.) Like the outside world, it's had some bad things happen in it (though I wouldn't say it's ever had anything Bad with a Capital B happen), but the scales have definitely stayed tilted more to the Good side (and yes, I'm lucky enough to say I'd class the Good things in my life as Good with a Capital G). At the start of this brave new year of 2018, I send wishes to all that your coming months are filled with Good with a Capital G, and if any bad visits, it's not Bad with a capital B, but only the inconvenient and temporarily unpleasant bad that makes us really appreciate the beauty and blessings of life.

Happy New Year, all!