The Anti-Christmas Carol
THE MISER’S EPIPHANY
In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James quotes a passage from John Foster’s Essay on Decision of Character. The story has always haunted me—yet on the surface, there is nothing typically haunting about it. James is examining the conversion experience. He is illustrating the point: “to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity: and the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material.”
James explains: “In any event, a young man wastes his fortune when he falls into bad company who ‘when his means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect and contempt.’ Thinking of suicide, he climbs a hill where he could survey for the last time his former property. After several hours of reflection, ‘he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion.’
“From that moment on, he was ‘determined to seize the first opportunity, however humble a kind, to gain any money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and resolved absolutely not to spend, if he could help it, a farthing of whatever he might obtain.’”
He loads coal, receives a few pence, and asks for meat and drink, which is also given to him. That begins his new life. As the years pass, “He speedily but cautiously turned his first gains into second advantages; retained without a single deviation his extreme parsimony.” Eventually, he died “inveterate miser, worth 60,000 pounds”, which is roughly about eight million dollars in today’s money.
This account reads like the Christmas Carol in reverse. I, still a fan of that over-told fable, want the young man in his despair to find transcendent meaning in his life—love, God, our common humanity—and act accordingly. Even if he had decided there was no meaning (which is unavoidably transcendent because meaninglessness must be universal) that was preferable to the course he chose. Something. Anything. Like the ending of a satisfying movie. Yet, I may be missing the point. I’ve known people almost as obsessive as the miser, and for them making money was a vast absorbing game. Certainly, he simplified his life by reducing every human transaction to whether he gained materially. He achieved his goal, and perhaps by his lights died a happy man.
Or not. James contended the young man was converted to avarice, but maybe, in a way, he was converted to vengeance. He was taken advantage of, used for his money by “friends” until his money ran out, and then for the rest of his life, did the same to others, at least insofar as only regarding them as sources of material advancement. I assume he was friendless when he died. Did he care? Maybe not. He had gotten his revenge. Either way, his life was a tragedy in its emptiness. And I do not like to be reminded that life can be so empty.