![]() ![]() Like Dickens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured a similar aspect of sorrow in his poem “The Rainy Day.” In between a few short lines describing intense grimness, he hints at the winds and rains as useful for clearing away lifeless debris. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.” Less than a paragraph later, Dickens uses the last lines of the chapter to demonstrate this literarily. In other words, sadness was not necessarily Pip’s enemy, but instead, a tool for discovering something better, a more honest sense of “self.” And the honesty led to more sunlit possibilities. Riding along in a coach, he ponders, “I was better after I had cried, than before-more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.” And then Dickens tells us plainly the avenue Pip used to discover his painful awareness: Pip was deliberating “with an aching heart.” ![]() If you were to read a little further along, you’d find more of Pip’s thoughts underlined in pencil, leaving clues to his sadness. ![]() If you were ever to borrow my copy of Charles Dickens’ classic novel Great Expectations, one hundred and sixty-seven pages into it-nearly at the end of chapter 19-you’d discover the following line underscored in pencil: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.” Dickens scribbled those words into the protagonist’s mind. Timelapse cloudscape with bright sun shining with clouds passing. ![]()
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