A Tale of Two Tales

I don’t know how many times I’ve read A Tale of Two Cities. I don’t even know what it means to have read the book a given number of times. I’ve read it all the way through several times. I’ve read parts of it over and over. I’ve skimmed over it a few times in order to prepare for teaching it in various classes. Who can say what that all adds up to? C. S. Lewis says that there’s a difference between books that one has read and books that one reads. I just finished reading A Tale of Two Cities today, Charles Dickens’s birthday. So in one sense I have read it just now. But in another sense, A Tale of Two Cities is a book that I read, present tense – read repeatedly, read periodically, read continually.

I wrote a lot about this novel on these pages in February and March of 2014. I posted a bit more about it in July of last year. When I started rereading it a few days ago, I wondered what I could possibly put on the blog this time. But then I looked through some of my old notes to myself from 2014 and saw that I told my then-future self to read the story from the Arabian Nights about the Loadstone Rock (Dickens’s spelling). I’m so glad I did!

The story is “The Tale of the Third Calender.” In this tale, Scheherazade keeps her bloodthirsty king entertained for quite a while through several episodes. First, a prince sails too close to a magnetic island, which draws all the nails from the ship, killing everyone but the prince himself, who swims to the loadstone island. Then he is told that he can escape the island but only under strict conditions, which he breaks. Landing on a new island, he discovers a boy being abandoned and learns that the youth has been put there for safekeeping after being told that he was fated to be killed by a man who escaped the Loadstone Rock. The prince of course does indeed kill the boy, quite accidentally, even while trying to protect him. Then (or maybe I’ve reversed the order of the last two episodes) he finds a group of ten men blind in one eye and insists they tell him their story, even if it costs him an eye! They tell him to go to a certain castle with ninety-nine wooden doors and one golden door; he must stay there for forty days and may not enter the room with the golden door. Of course he does it anyway and is taken by a roc, whose whipping tail knocks his eye out.

A Tale of Two Cities also is about a nobleman’s son who brings about death even by trying to do good and is drawn inevitably to his crisis as surely as nails are drawn to a magnet. The last chapter of the second part in fact, is called “Drawn to the Loadstone Rock,” and in that chapter, the nephew and heir of the Marquis d’Evrémonde returns to revolutionary France (crossing the sea, like the Calender!) to help a former servant. He had earlier renounced his title because he didn’t want to contribute more to the misery of the poor, but this makes no difference to the jury eager to make every nobleman “look through the little window” of Sainte Guillotine and feed her unquenchable thirst for ghastly wine. Too bad the Marquis couldn’t tell stories like Scheherazade and repeatedly put off his appointment with the National Razor (which always, according to the popular joke of the time, shaves too close).

I don’t want to give any more away than I have to, but over and over, Dickens and his characters say that the events in the story are absolutely inevitable given the conditions. One result is that A Tale of Two Cities acts as a Loadstone Rock on me and draws me through itself line by beautiful line. I put it aside for now, but I’ll feel the book’s gentle influence often over the next few years until I put myself close enough to be drawn in once again.