A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
The point of view changes here to first person, and if you're not paying close enough attention, you will just read right on by it without noticing. Who is this speaker? Is it the narrator? Is it Lorry as he rides in the coach? Is it Dickens himself? What is he talking about?
It reminds me of Carl Jung's "Analytical Psychology." Jung's concept of the shadow refers to a repressed, disowned aspect of human consciousness. We all, says Jung, have a secret side, hidden pockets in our mind that are made up of thoughts, feelings, and instincts that we'd never want to get out into the light of day. Ruthless and brutal individuals' shadows would be gentle, and someone who is kindhearted may have a shadow that is harsh and judgmental. To a certain extent, we are aware of the darker aspects of ourselves. We have thoughts we are too ashamed of to speak aloud. We have dreams that we can't justify. So what do we do? We hide them from the world. We lock them away and pretend they don't exist. On the other hand, Jung would say we have a darker side of our consciousnesses that we share with all of humanity. With the benefit of modern science, it might even help us understand it better if we explain it as a sort of "evolutionary memory." Jung's notion of the collective unconscious suggests that because we share a common physical heritage, we also share common psychological predispositions. This shared human knowledges manifests itself in the form of archetypes. Archetypes are innate and universal symbols that stem from our shared ancestry. I often half-jokingly refer to it as "the memory of the planet." And if taken far enough, can be used to explain tough questions like, "How is a human being capable of sacrificial love?" and "How is a human being capable of the most atrocious act, murder?" The collective unconscious is a body of knowledge shared by all of humanity--every individual--because all of us share ancestors who "slew the woolly mammoth." All of us share ancestors who discovered fire. All of us share ancestors who murdered a brother. If you really want to take it to the extreme, all of us share ancestors who swung in trees. All of us share ancestors that crawled from the water onto dry land. All of us have "stardust" in our bones--fractions of elements not even found on Earth.
Intentionally or not, these secrets that Dickens refers to at the beginning of this chapter prepare us for the atrocious acts to come in the novel. The careless and heartless killing of a baby run over by a carriage, where the wealthy Marquis d'Evremond flips the mourning father a gold coin for his trouble. The brutal and indiscriminate beheadings on the guillotine.
Jung was nine when Dickens died. I have to wonder if he read A Tale of Two Cities when he was a young man.
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