What I’ve learned from reading Great Expectations

I am having a secret love affair with Charles Dickens, or, rather, with his novel, Great Expectations. You’ve probably read it, so I won’t bore you with a plot synopsis. But I’m not just having a love affair with Pip and Estella. Oh, no. Too boring, that kind of love affair. I’m having a love affair with Mr. Dickens’ words, and I’m having a love affair with how I can apply these words to my life.

Take for instance:

Now I return to this young fellow. Come on. How many of you would have given anything for another chance with the one who got away?

Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one’s glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one’s nose. Hello. Reasons for drinking wine until that bottle is empty? A need for society to get on board with alcoholism and indulgence? Yes, please.

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule. People are going to disappoint you, and in this disappointment, take Dickens’ lesson to heart: Trust what you know to be true, not what you think is true, and certainly not the truth presented to you.

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. Pick a day. Is that day today, or was that day yesterday, or is that day three years from now, a day like any other day, but a day after which nothing again will be the same. Pick a day. I pick a day I haven’t lived yet, and I will only this day has been lived when nothing again, after, is the same.

We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one. Hello, writer friends. Not just gay writer friends, but you can come play too. This is the story of our lives, and of Dickens’ life, and of the life of a writer who grew more popular post-mortem. Unlucky bastard.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I’m guilty of this, so guilty. Living afraid of consequences when the consequences of living afraid of consequences was consequence enough. I no longer live afraid of consequences because the consequences are the consequences I create by living the way I live, the way I want to live.

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I never cried. Never. And I kept never crying until I had no choice but to cry, and once I started crying, I realized how difficult not crying was and could be and so I cry and I don’t mind crying and I cry and I don’t mind crying and I am teaching my children that crying is OK, despite what they might hear from others.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape. And this quote makes me cry because I wish I had written this quote and I may copy down this quote and look at this quote and wonder just how Charles Dickens grew so smart and why we do not worship him like a god.