I just finished A Tale of Two Cities and I must say that I’m quite disappointed in myself. Do you know the closing lines to this famous Dickens’s novel? It’s quite possible that you’re smarter and better read then me, but just in case I’ll reproduce the lines here:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

This is perhaps the most famous line in literature and I had no idea where it came from. What’s worse, I have heard this line hundreds of times in silly sitcoms and out of the mouths literary parrots, and most likely parodied them myself, without knowing the origin. Really, that’s rather sad. Why are we, as a culture, using lines that we have no idea of their origin? For all I knew this quote could have come from a KKK recruiting pamphlet. As it is, these lines are spoken by (or thought by) an innocent man walking to his death, because he feels he is not as good as another man who happens to look a heck of a lot like him. “Rest” equals death. Sydney Carton has one serious inferiority complex and, in my opinion, is much sexier than that goody-goody Charles Darnay. But that’s not my point. The point is, unless we know where the quote comes from, we really should not be using it, especially when the lines involve a walk to the guillotine. Or Madame Guillotine, as Dickens would say.

On a related note, while writing this blog I am watching Smash Lab, a show on the Discovery channel where they spend 60 minutes blowing up buildings and the like. The narrator just said, in reference to the Smash Lab team building a fake wall to be blown up, that they like “a fine and private place” to conduct their explosive experiments. What possible connection can that allusion have to the demolition of brick walls? Is our narrator a frustrated Marvell scholar, or did he hear that phrase on a Simpson’s episode? Either way, it made me happy, like I was in on some snobby joke, which is the true secret to why allusions are so popular.