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Toronto's PATH Led Me to Charles Dickens 4/14/2015 2:47:03 PM
A little more than a year ago, I had a medical procedure called angioplasty in which a surgeon inserted a stent in an artery to improve the flow of blood from my heart. Two months later, I began a 26-week therapy program, at the end of which I had a series of exercises to carry out and also a prescription to walk 2.5 miles in 50 minutes five times a week.
Winter weather arrived soon after the program finished, so I needed to find indoor places to walk. I went to malls in various parts of Toronto, where I live, and complexes like three business and residential buildings near my apartment that have interconnected lobbies that make walking easy.
I also discovered Toronto's PATH, a network of walkways underneath the city's thriving business district. The paths are wide enough to make room for the thousands of people who use them every day, brightly lit, and lined with shops and eating places that are interesting to look at as I hurried by.
Especially interesting were the people I saw, many of them moving faster than I was. Ambitious, energetic, from many racial and ethnic backgrounds, in different stages of life's journey -- young clerks and rising business people, middle-aged folks still keen for advancement and profit, and older folks, some of whom looked prosperous and lordly.
I liked my walks along the PATH, because I was in familiar territory. Decades ago, I worked in the banking business in down-town Boston, where I saw countless people similar to folks I passed on Toronto's PATH.
I realized that I could never re-enter the life that absorbed these people, since my community was elsewhere. I couldn't know them or their stories and likely would never see them again. In down-town Boston, by contrast, I knew dozens of people and was part of the business world. The stories of my recent temporary neighbors were closed to me.
At the same time, as a kind of consolation, I recalled that while I worked as a bank clerk in my home city, I also read novels by Charles Dickens for the first time.
Dickens, of course, knew something about business districts. He worked at a boot-blacking factory at a tender age, and some of his characters are steeped in the business environment. Ralph Nickleby,for one, the grasping uncle of Nicholas; the improvident Mr. Micawber, who held onto his belief that good fortune was around the corner; Pip in Great Expectations, who comes to maturity in spite of big-city ambitions and snobbery that he acquires for a time; Scrooge, naturally, and the immortal Bob Cratchet; then, too, the almost successful Mr. Guppy in the masterpiece Bleak House.
I couldn't know the attractive, upbeat people I passed during my walks, but I had a collection of Dickens's people, whom I did know, to keep me company.
This isn't the occasion to unroll the story of my adventures with Dickens' stories, except to say this. I recently read a comment by a professional literary critic who hoped to build up the work of another writer by saying that Dickens' characters are outlandish.
The poor critic. He's never lived. Dickens brings his readers into contact with the variety and strength and struggles of ordinary humanity. He portrays our capacity for love and mocks our greed and selfishness. He warns us over and over that the blandishments and refinements of the great world aren't all there is to life or even the most important part. Other values are available and many seek them.
The imaginary world Dickens created mirrors the one we live in and that brings us many things more outlandish than anything even the greatest author imagined. Dickens takes a positive way: he shows us that life is generally amazing and that creative people can astonish us with what they're capable of. He was one of our liberators.
As an afterthought, since I began by speaking of walking, I don't want to forget forget Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop. She accompanied her ailing grandfather, partly on foot, through the Midland of England and died as a result of the strain she passed through for the sake of love. At this point in my life, I don't sneer at twists like that in a good story, sentimental as they may be.
rfrenchnovelist.com
