Present and Eternal Time in A Christmas Carol

Beloved time traveler and reformed miser Ebenezer Scrooge picks up what the ghosts of past, present, and future are throwing down. At (tiny) Tim Cratchit’s grave, he vows: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!” (Dickens 98). The lessons he expresses that he has learned are geared toward his (meta)physical and quantum relationships, orientations, to space-time. Scrooge’s lessons are both Newtonian (practical) and Einsteinian (theoretical). In his string of promises to the (ghost of the) future, he will honor Christmas where? In his heart–a physical as well as emotional organ. He will “keep” Christmas–a verb that has both physical (“I am keeping XYZ object in this safe”) and emotional/spiritual (“I am keeping/honoring the sentiment XYZ”) connotations. Not only will Scrooge live, or reside, in the past, present and the future, but these spirits will take an active role–striving–within him. The lessons that the past, present and future teach will not be shut out, but, rather, Scrooge will step aside and allow them to work actively within “me”–whatever that “me” is, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or all of the above.

It takes “seeing”–in his mind’s eye, or with his physical eyes, or both–the potential for an innocent child’s death to evoke the emotional response necessary for Scrooge to express the desire to change. The emotional shock of spontaneous compassion provides Scrooge with an inspiration for which his humanity and, by extension, his other stored-up capital, his money, to flow freely between him and others in the way that (old) Fezziwig’s compassion and financial generosity benefited Scrooge and his coworker. Tiny Tim, who is part of Scrooge’s present and future reckoning, is noted for his physicality, his size–he is tiny. In contrast, Fezziwig’s epithet calls to attention his relationship to Scrooge in time–that he is “old.” It is first the “old,” then the “tiny,” which operate most strongly on Scrooge’s determination to alter his spirit, his attitude and his ways.  Not only does/did Fezziwig provide the time and space for young Scrooge to experience a Christmas Eve ball, “Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side the door, and shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas” (43). “‘A small matter … to make these silly folks so full of gratitude,’” the Ghost of the past says, expertly using reverse-psychology with Scrooge who “during the whole of this time … had acted like a man out of his wits” with his “heart and soul” “in the scene, and with his former self” (43). “‘He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four, perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?’” the ghost asks (44). When he is oriented in the past, Scrooge expresses the insight that “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. … The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune” (44). If the spirit of the past is kind, like a modern psychotherapist, asking Scrooge questions like “What is the matter?” then the spirit of the future is a traditional Jungian, who sits silently and records without responding to everything that Scrooge says and expresses–a ruder awakening than the gentle approach which orients Scrooge into this time-traveling exploration, albeit the one that ultimately spurs Scrooge to the most emotional, and therefore the most life-altering reaction, when he makes his declaration to reform at Tiny Tim’s grave.

In his book Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time, Dean Buonomano articulates the two duelling views of the nature of time: presentism and eternalism. Presentism is the theory of time favored in his field of neuroscience, while eternalism is favored by physics and in philosophy, goes back “at least two-and-a-half millennia, to the Greek philosopher Parmenides, who believed we lived in a timeless world.” Buonomano writes:

“Presentism, as the name hints, states that only the present is real. Under presentism, the past is a configuration of the universe that once existed, and the future refers to some yet-to-be-determined configuration. Eternalism, in sharp contrast, states that the past and the future are as equally real as the present. There is absolutely nothing particularly special about the present: under eternalism, now is to time as here is to space. Even though you currently find yourself to be in one point in space, you know that there are many other points in space. … Similarly, even though you perceive yourself to be in a point in time you call now, there are past and future moments in time in which other beings, and younger and older yous, find themselves” (Buonomano 11).

In presentism, then, Scrooge’s time travel would be impossible, the conversation regarding it a non-starter. If only the present exists, then there would be no “reason”–practically or logically–to travel back into his stored memories or forward to what might have been or what will be if actions do not (now) change. Scrooge can’t change the past, but he can change his perception of and attitude about it to shape his present and future actions and future effects thereof. In other words, Scrooge shifts from an attitude of “presentism”–what is–to one of eternalism, affirming the possibility that “there would be ‘places’ (moments) in time to travel to” (Buonomo 12). This shift, this belief in the magic of eternalism made possible by (1) Scrooge’s and (2) Dickens’ readers’ belief in the narrator’s emphatic beginning of the tale that “Marley was as dead as a doornail” when all this time-traveling hoopla begins, began, and will begin again next time we read or watch a version of The Christmas Carol. In the eternalist reading that is made possible by Dickens’ tale and our suspension of disbelief while reading literature in general, “mankind was,” is and will be Marley’s, Scrooge’s and our “business” (Dickens 25)–before, during and after reading A Christmas Carol, time and again, Christmas after Christmas, year after year.

Works Cited

Buonomano, Dean. Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. Norton, 2017. Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol and Other Stories.