Retired. Former investment banker, Columbia University-educated, Vietnam Vet (67-68). For the writing techniques I use, see Mary Duffy's e-book: Sentence Openers. To read my book reviews of the Classics visit my blog: Writing To Live
This is an appreciation of the angelic Mr. Dick.
In Charles Dickens' David Copperfield we meet angelic innocence personified in Mr. Dick. What to Miss Betsey Trotwood seemed to be deep human problems that need to be solved, to Mr. Dick they are but simple events which need simple answers.
When David first arrives at his aunt's place, Miss Betsey addresses Mr. Dick: 'how can you pretend to be wool-gathering, Dick when you are as sharp as a surgeon's lancet? Now, here you see young David Copperfield, and the question I put to you is, what shall I do with him?' Of course, this is a momentous occasion for David, a matter of survival-a moral problem.
Under pressure to give a sound answer, Mr. Dick replies, 'I should-I should wash him!'
In the end Miss Betsy always follows Mr. Dick's advice because in his humanness Mr. Dick is never wrong: "Mr. Dick sets us all right."
Yet Miss Betsy, David Copperfield, and others know that Mr. Dick is "mad." While we sane people tend to see reality as it is or should be, characters like Mr. Dick see the reverse side of it. And who is to say that the reverse side of things is not the real side. While eccentrics, madmen, and artists retain that child-like virtue of seeing in that elusive magical dimension, most of us lose it. And with that we lose innocence-Eden. Cast out of Eden we are so doomed to an existence in a world corrupted by time and experience and from which can never escape.
My fascination with Mr. Dick is that he is a writer whose life is devoted to writing a Memorial of King Charles, a memorial that he destroys as soon as he writes it, much as Penelope did weaving and unweaving her tapestry. Besides being a writer, Mr. Dick is a man-child who delights in building and flying kites.
One day Mr. Dick invites David to go fly with him his new creation-a seven feet high kite! What caught my attention in this reading is that the kite is covered with the very same manuscript that the innocent soul has written:
'There's plenty of string,' said Mr. Dick, 'and when it flies high, it takes the facts a long way. That's my manner of diffusing 'em. I don't know where they may come down. It's according to circumstances, and the wind, and so forth; but I take my chance of that.'
In that magical dimension in which Mr. Dick lives, he envisions and foresees that words -which he calls facts- not only live, fly, soar, and travel in space, but that also have consequences which a writer cannot foresee. In a century in which radio, TV, satellite, and other special communication was unknown, only a madman could have foreseen that.
When we see the reverse side of a carpet, or a leaf, or the negative of a photograph, we think that one side is the right or correct side and the other the obverse-a simulacra. This may not be so.
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