On Saturday night, being in solitude but content, I consumed a pint of London Pride in Muswell Hill before going to bed, and let my eyes alternate between the football review on TV and a reading in the weekend magazine of the Financial Times. There are three young fellas playing pool in one corner and three old folks, who look to me like fox hunters, drinking. Apart from a girl, of whom only half his back I can see from my position, the place is lovely cozy, but manly, which is a pity for a Saturday night. The point of argumentation of the FT reading was made out of an initial observation on Mr. Scrooge's sad existence before the Ghosts: he was a man being hunted.
Mr. Scrooge has a tortuous and deformed soul, and so does his countenance: wrinkled wax forehead, yellow teeth and grey eyes flashing from a dark and hardened heart. However, this is the point, HE IS NO EVIL, as Mr Hyde is, for instance. The old man was beguiled in time by avarice and burn to the bone _Even Love won't do any good to him, so he has been casted as an enduring and everlasting SLAVE of the capital. However, I insist, he has no evil: he granted his clerk the whole Christmas Day off, did he not?
He is harmless, that's it. As oppose, we will recognize Evil as that unbridled urgency to hurt other people and rejoice with it. But Mr. Scrooge seems not to be able to hurt anyone BUT HIMSELF. A poor, sad and lonely man, consumed by his own self.
He has and is been hunted.
Oh, how big this truth is!!!! And how many poor humans are on the brink of destruction, being hunted and imprisoned by their very selfs. Look around! How many of them do you see? Like those two drunkards in treatment from Carver's story: "There is this side of me who tells me what to do and fills me with comfort, I agree with it and I see it clear... But, then, there is also the other side".
The disparaging thing seems to be that, unlike a Christmas Carol, if the other side is manifested, it will be unstoppable, a truly human-wolf devouring himself. It is the terrible fate of the doomed.
What kind of redemption is for them?
Well, it is clear, dear Albert, that only a poor flashing is possible from grey eyes connected dark heart... .
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