Ebenezer : [as Marley lies on his death bed] Well, Jacob! Have they seen to you properly? Last rites and such?
[Marley nods]
Ebenezer : There’s nothing i can do?
[Marley nods again]
Ebenezer : Oh? What, particularly?
Jacob Marley : [rasping] While… there’s still time…
Ebenezer : Time? Time for what?
Jacob Marley : [rasping] Wrong… we were wrong.
Ebenezer : Wrong? Well, we can’t be right all the time , can we? Nobody’s perfect. You mustn’t reproach yourself, Jacob. We’ve been no worse than the next man, or no better if it comes to that.
Jacob Marley : [rasping] Save… yourself.
Ebenezer : Save myself? Save myself from what?
[Marley breathes his last]
Screenplay, A Christmas Carol (1951)
The things you find on the internet! From 1971 an animated A Christmas Carol. Neither my Bride nor I can recall this, but if it came out on American television in the seventies one of us would have been sure to have seen it. Alastair Sim reprises, by voice, his role from the live action film version in 1951, the version which my family as I was growing up always viewed prior to Christmas each year.
Charles Dickens was rather a bounder in his personal life, and he hated Catholicism, but I have always thought that in his portrayal of the ghost of Jacob Marley he unwittingly depicted a soul in Purgatory carrying the weight of his sins, saddened beyond measure by the inability of he and his fellow sufferers to intervene in the affairs of Man for good, and given the grace by God to do so in the life of his bitter former business partner Scrooge.
“How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.” It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow. “That is no light part of my penance,” pursued the Ghost. “I am here to-night to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”
How better to do penance for our sins than to be granted the ability by God, now and again, to intervene for good, the interventions that should be our constant business while we are here in this Vale of Tears, but that we are too often distracted from by the cares and pleasures of this life? It is at Christmas I think that we remember this task, something that should stay with us all the year from Christmas to Christmas.
Hope Biden, our Scrooge, is having such dreams and make an announcement renouncing his corrupt election which could save his soul.
Thanks, Don, for a ray of light.
I remember seeing that animated Christmas Carol on TV when it came out, and the spooky animation has stayed with me all my life! Marley’s Ghost is especially creepy, with his mouth hanging open like a cavern entrance after removing the napkin around his head. That’s where I Iearned about the old tradition of tying a cloth around the head of the deceased, to prevent the jaw from dropping open. It’s a pity the story had to be so compressed to fit into a half-hour time slot, because a full-length version would have been fantastic!
Hear, hear, Michael Dowd!
However, I am certain Biden fulfills TS Eliot’s prophecy (“We are the Hollow Men..”).
A craven, venal man who will lie, deny,and say anything for power.
Business.
Jesus tells Mary and Joseph…did you not know that I must be about my Father’s affairs … when confronted by Our Lady, the fifth Joyful mystery.
Marley tells Ebenezer; Business! Charity was our business. The welfare of our neighbors, that’s OUR business. Sharing what we have …that is our business!
( Paraphrasing )
God is good to us.
Giving us everything to care for His Father’s enterprises….
I always love an article on A Christmas Carol. I agree that the notion of Purgatory is present, at least as much, if not more so, as it is present in the first act of Hamlet.
Dickens has been accused of never explicitly mentioning or acknowledging Christianity, but that is obviously (pedantically even) belied by the name of this novella. More importantly, there is Tiny Tim’s famous speech: “[I]t might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
More importantly, there is Tiny Tim’s famous speech: “[I]t might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
That is golden, that delivery.
Beautiful line.
Thanks Fr. J
[I]t might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
For personal reasons I always tear up at that line.
We used to watch the Mickey Mouse version as kids on VCR.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey's_Christmas_Carol
Scrooge McDuck suited the role very well!
We have been much impressed by Patrick Stewart’s portrayal of Scrooge, as well as the 1951 version.
“It is at Christmas I think that we remember this task, something that should stay with us all the year from Christmas to Christmas.”
A practical suggestion. Join the St Vincent de Paul Society wherever you are. Neighbors in need are everywhere. Many hands make light work.
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours. — St. Teresa of Ávila
In the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet says:
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
But he just saw a ghost! The ghost must have been from somewhere beyond death but before the undiscovered country, a stop on the way to the final destination.
Pinky:
The undiscovered country is immortality.
Believe or no, immortality is real, because made in the image and likeness of God, man cannot be infinite. Man can only be immortal.