(Owen Meany is right, of course most of us think the scariest Ghost is the one who knows what's going to happen, the inevitable consequences coming down the pike But, shit The older you get, the less scared you are of that And the more you're scared of his opposite)
-
Show this thread
-
Replying to @arthur_affect
I suppose you could say: The future is the ghost that scares the young, the past is the ghost that scares the old, the present* is the ghost that scares us all. *Or maybe I'm the only one disturbed by Ignorance and Want and the implication that they are always just "there".
1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes -
Replying to @Overlord_Mikey
The interesting thing to me about the story is that Scrooge's fiancée diagnoses his problem when he was young as thinking *too much* about the future His vice of greed is really born of fear That's why it's just avarice, greed for money, not gluttony -- he's not having any fun
2 replies 8 retweets 30 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
Dickens was attacking a specific mindset in 19th-century Britain (one that's still with us today), the whole Protestant work ethic idea that saving money = virtue and the wisest, smartest, best people are "millionaires next door" who have millions in the bank they don't touch
2 replies 5 retweets 35 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
The whole irony that if Scrooge were a "worse" person he'd be a better person If he just blew that whole fortune on booze and sex and big dinners and shit Then people would be getting paid for those things, and they'd be able to pay their rent and buy groceries
1 reply 3 retweets 33 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
So the whole deal with why the Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come is able to fuck him up so hard is that it reveals he was *wrong*, he's *played himself* He's spent his *whole fucking life* preparing for the Future -- Past showing him the full terrible cost of that -- and *failed*
2 replies 5 retweets 33 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
He never understood the basic fucking fact that children learn as their first encounter with the real world Eventually you just fucking die Then all the money you have in the bank and in title deeds and sound investments is completely worthless to you Then there's nothing
1 reply 3 retweets 21 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
Future and Past tag-team him, you see The terrible truth of the Future is that you hit the end of your life and *there is no Future* Then the Past is *everything*, there's nothing but Past, no direction to look but backwards
2 replies 3 retweets 17 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
Which means if you've spent your whole damn life "planning for the Future" you fucking wasted all of it Constantly giving birds in the hand for two in the bush 80 fucking years of misery and suffering "just in case" poverty came, and then you look back and you were always poor
1 reply 4 retweets 24 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
This is, again, obvious shit that everyone ought to know as common sense But at the time, as a satire of British conventional wisdom about household finance aimed at the poor by moral scolds, it was blistering And honestly it's still a message worth repeating
4 replies 4 retweets 23 likes
A more specific message than just the "Be nice to people and donate to the poor" stuff that people take away from it Like Dickens is very directly and very angrily addressing people like Dave Ramsay and other "personal finance gurus"
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.