“I Will Live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!”

Many of us are sadly familiar with the constant struggle to live in a world where financial concerns dictate much of what we do, think, and feel. When we tell our life story to ourselves or others, we tend to measure our success in monetary terms, and to gauge others accordingly. This is true even for people who were raised with socialist values, but find themselves unable to move away from the capitalist system in which we are all inevitably trapped. A fictional mirror may help us see a different way out. Scrooge, the protagonist of Dickens’s famous story, A Christmas Carol , is so deeply immersed in popular culture that his very name became a noun. A tight-fisted and cold- hearted man who undergoes a miraculous transformation, his tale inspires us with very possibility of change, even if we, like Scrooge, are trapped, have hardened our hearts, and fear we may never be able to open up again.