James Baquet We live in an age of short attention spans. In a recent survey, 64% of readers said they would stop reading a book if the opening lines weren't interesting. And 43% said the opening lines of a novel can “make or break” it. But this isn’t strictly a recent phenomenon. One thinks of one of the greatest opening lines in American literature: “Call me Ishmael,” at the start of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, “Moby-Dick.” Then there’s one of the greatest in British literature, at the beginning of “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens (1859): “It was the best of time, it was the worst of times ...” But for my money, the greatest opening line by Dickens (or any other author) is the first six words of his “A Christmas Carol”: “Marley was dead: to begin with.” I am re-reading this very short novel for the umpteenth time, and am struck by the importance of Marley’s character. What does that mean, “dead: to begin with?” Isn’t dead just, well, dead? But no, because the crux of this first chapter (Dickens pretentiously called them “staves”) is a visit from Marley’s ghost! Ask the average literate American or Englishman, “How many ghosts visited Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve?” and he’ll answer with certainty, “Three!” But that’s not right. Jacob Marley is “the forgotten ghost.” True, in Staves Two, Three, and Four, Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come; and in the fifth and final Stave he is converted from miserliness and cruelty to charity and kindness through the influence of these visits. But the process begins when his old partner Marley appears to warn him that his behavior is forging chains that he will carry through eternity. If he does not change his ways — if he does not “walk abroad among his fellowmen” while alive — his spirit will be “condemned to do so after death ... to wander through the world ... and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!” If I were Scrooge, that right there would have changed my attitude. But he was a stubborn old cuss, and needed to see more ghosts — and, ultimately, his own lonely death —before he changed his ways. Marley’s ghost pointed the way. Vocabulary: Which word above means: 1. able to read 2. lengths of time 3. as a pose, not authentically 4. exactly 5. an undetermined large number 6. an annoying person 7. making, creating 8. key point 9. not easily changing one’s mind 10. stinginess, greed | 