by Houston Coley
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
-T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets
Somehow, time has already dragged us into 2025. Personally, I’ve had two majorly impactful viewing experiences over the holidays: seeing Interstellar in its theatrical IMAX re-release for the 10-year anniversary, and watching A.S. Peterson’s new stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol for Rabbit Room Theatre here in Nashville.
Interstellar in IMAX was a positively transformative experience; I’d always appreciated the movie on its technical merit, but suddenly on this viewing, I finally felt connected to the beating heart of it. Nolan’s movies have often been accused (I think, usually wrongly) of being overly heady and intellectual—but for my money, Interstellar is his most emotionally earnest work by far.
On the other end, Peterson’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol was exactly what I’d hoped it would be and more: a faithful and elegant rendition of deeply beloved source material, but much more than that, an adaptation which acknowledges and continually eludes to the theological and even cosmic undertones of Dickens’ original work. This is a Christmas Carol adaptation that makes reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Genesis 1 and C.S. Lewis in equal measure. I’ve been revisiting both the published play and the original novella ever since.
A Christmas Carol has been part of my life (and my understanding of the holidays) from a very early age, and there’s so much that I love about it: the eeriness of its peculiar seasonal ghost-story premise, Dickens’ prickly reflexive dialect and sense of humor, its rich capacity for diverse adaptation, its completely timeless resonance. Much of my appreciation since childhood, though, has always stemmed from the simple fact that Carol is one of the earliest “time travel” stories in modern literature. Of course, the time travel in A Christmas Carol doesn’t work quite like Back to The Future or Doctor Who; Scrooge has no ability to alter the past, but he has been granted the chance to briefly revisit it and observe for his own sake.
Time travel is more or less where the inspiration for this piece begins.
One of the more confronting moments for me while seeing this particular stage production of Carol was when Scrooge watches his younger self deciding to pursue his lust for financial gain even if it means his fiancée, Belle, has resolved to leave him. In Peterson’s adaptation, our older Scrooge stands between the two former lovers, begging his younger self to make a different choice: “Go after her, you fool!” he pleads, trying desperately to alter the deeds which have already been done and achieve a different outcome. He seems hopeful that his shouts and petitions will somehow pierce the veil between past and present, but it is no use; The Ghost of Christmas Past prods, “he cannot hear you from here. Would he have heard you then?”
It was in this moment, watching the scene unfold in the theater, that I came to a sudden realization: I was still watching Interstellar.
Interstellar is, you’ll probably be surprised to learn, a story not unlike A Christmas Carol. Indeed, the moment that had hit me so strongly while watching Dickens’ masterpiece was almost the same one that affected me most while experiencing Nolan’s.
In one of the penultimate sequences of Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper observes his own interactions with his daughter Murph through a rift in time, allowing him to peer through a bookshelf to witness the very day he decided to go to space and leave her behind: “Don’t go, you idiot! Stay! Don’t let me leave!” he bellows into the void, trying to get his younger self to make a different choice. But much like A Christmas Carol, Nolan’s Interstellar has already made it quite clear that the past is unalterable. Indeed, even when Future Cooper does manage to send a message—"STAY"—using morse code through the rift, it still fails to convince his younger self to change course. As the audience, we’ve known since the beginning that this was inevitable; we saw Cooper receive this message and dismiss it as a “ghost” at the start of the movie. What has happened has happened. If the past were different, he wouldn’t be where he is now. These are but the shadows of things that have been, and they cannot be altered.
This helplessness at being removed from time and left unable to affect change in the physical world is identified in the original Christmas Carol text as the key point of grief and torture for the spirits wandering the earth like Jacob Marley: “The misery with all of them clearly was that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost that power forever.” These spirits have lost their ability to live in time, doomed to dwell in eternity without experiencing the dignity of intervention. That lack of agency experienced by the wandering spirits in the present is the same sensation Scrooge experiences when he revisits his own past, realizing that time is indifferent to his regrets. It’s a deeply human experience that we all face at one point or another, regardless of our ability to actually time travel; we all must eventually reconcile with the passage of time and the knowledge that the clock can never be turned back to fix our mistakes. The past, for us, is “frozen and no longer flows.”
This harsh reality of time is maybe best demonstrated by one of the most harrowing sequences in Interstellar. When McConaughey’s Cooper and Anne Hathaway’s Dr. Brand get stranded out of their depth on a water planet where time flows differently, due to their own foolish and momentary decisions, they end up losing 23 years on Earth in what for them feels like mere minutes. Stuck waiting on the ship to recover, Cooper desperately tries to come up with a pseudoscientific way to “somehow gain back the years.” Brand rolls her eyes at his naivety: “Time is relative,” she says, “it can stretch and it can squeeze…but it can’t run backwards. It just can’t.”
Only a few scenes later, one of the film’s most iconic moments occurs when Cooper sobs through 23 years of video messages from his two children, watching them both age beyond him and eventually grow disillusioned with the hope of his return. Time has left its insoluble mark, and while “gaining back the years” might be one of our core human desires, it is not in the cards for any of us. Time cannot run backwards.
And yet…
In both Interstellar and A Christmas Carol, higher beings than ourselves offer mere mortals the chance to bend time and space for the sake of a grand redemption.
In A Christmas Carol, these higher beings are the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future—and that of Jacob Marley, who seems to have exerted some small agency by “procuring” these visitations for Scrooge at great cost. With the help of the spirits, Scrooge is able to fly across both time and space to witness, observe, and maybe even change.
Interstellar is not dissimilar. In this story, mysterious and ethereal “higher beings” have constructed a “tesseract” within a black hole—a physical, kaleidoscopic realm allowing Cooper to traverse time and space to peer through his daughter’s bookshelf at every moment from infinity. The past cannot be changed—and indeed, it does not change—but perhaps a message can be sent to the present, if Cooper’s daughter Murph is still out there listening.
It is emblematic of Interstellar’s somewhat less-theistic worldview that the “higher beings” who constructed the tesseract are initially thought to be aliens, but by the end are speculated by Cooper to be humans themselves at some future state of evolution or progress. Earlier in the film, Hathaway’s Dr. Brand speculates about these beings: “To them, time might be another physical dimension. To them, the past might be a canyon they can climb into and the future, a mountain they can climb up. But for us, it’s not.”
I mention that Interstellar is less-than-theistic, which may be true in its unabashed humanism, but in other ways the story is still distinctly transcendent. Anne Hathaway’s famous speech about love as “the only force that transcends both time and space” is more than just words; it’s the core of the movie.
In both Interstellar and A Christmas Carol, hope for the future lies not in the past, but in the present—and indeed, specifically in a combination between the present and the cosmic reality of love.
It is fitting that this would be the case, especially in A Christmas Carol.
Christmas itself, after all, is a cosmic inflection point—the moment that Christians believe God himself entered into The Present for the cause of love. This is the higher being who can climb into the past like a canyon and scale the future like a mountain, and he gives it all up to become a child who will someday be crucified. The spiritual journey through time undergone by Scrooge on Christmas Eve was hardly the first of its kind; it was on the original Christmas Eve, that night of nights when Christ was born, that time itself was first upended for mortal redemption. The God of the vast universe entered into time and became a human being, temporally subject to time’s reality—and therefore, the reality of death—but not ultimately bound by it. Not unlike Interstellar, new stars and strange sights appeared in the mysterious night sky. Frightening beings descended as messengers from other realms. Earth touched eternity, if only for a moment.
An extradimensional God entering our world and incarnating himself in the limited confine known as “The Present” is no small thing. It makes one think that how this God carried and expressed himself in his limited years as a human being living in time must be vastly important to understanding how we are meant to live in time as limited human beings. And not just that: it suggests that God himself deemed it useful and even beautiful to inhabit time as a medium for his good work.
In Burnt Norton, the first poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Eliot muses, “What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.”
The cosmic meaning of The Present is baked into Eliot’s work, particularly in The Four Quartets—and it’s baked into A Christmas Carol, too. This is why, despite the novella’s timeless social relevance to class and wealth and generosity, I believe it has even broader universality to the daily human experience.
If Scrooge felt helpless and stripped of the ability to enact change upon the world around him both when he revisited the past and when he glimpsed a potential dark future, he experiences the liberating freedom of the opposite when he returns to his life in the present, realizing that “best and happiest of all, the time before him was his own, to make amends with.”
Scrooge’s joyful, childlike spiritual rebirth upon waking up to find that it is still Christmas morning is far more than simply a tale of a man “learning to celebrate holiday cheer.” It is one of the most compelling pictures in literary history of a human being recognizing the agency and liberation of living in the physical dimension known as The Present. There could be no more symbolic day to receive that gift than Christmas morning.
It is this very transcendent power found in The Present that C.S. Lewis wrote about in The Screwtape Letters:
“The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them.”
Far from being a prison or a limited plane of existence, our ability to live and breathe and have our physical being in The Present is no small gift—and it is what makes us different than mere spirits or ethereal phantoms. In physical body, in spiritual word, in practical deed…we have supernatural agency that they do not.
Of course, the reality of The Present is not the only reality in the world. Were that the case, perhaps Scrooge would have never been redeemed. It is only through encountering the Past, Present, and (eternal) Future that Scrooge finds himself reshaped and reborn. At the end of the book, he proclaims, “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future! The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me!”
It is no coincidence that Scrooge is describing a trinity of spirits; living in this tension between past, present, and future is only ever remotely possible through something divine. The frozen past and the ethereal future can only ever be fully known to God; to truly live with an awareness of both of them means finding a way to reconcile their realities in the fleeting and eternal entry point of The Present—the “still point of the turning world.”
Part of the hope offered by both A Christmas Carol and Interstellar lies in the truth that though time marches on and the past cannot be undone, the reality of love still provides an opportunity to redeem what was once thought to be forever broken.
In Interstellar, though McConaughey’s Cooper knows he cannot change the past, he still sends a coded message through the tesseract in the hope and faith that his (now adult) daughter Murph will be listening in the present. Cooper’s hope is well-founded. Despite Murph’s seemingly permanent disillusionment with her father’s disappearance, she still has enough belief in his love for her—and her love for him—that she returns to her childhood bedroom with a completely irrational “feeling” that he might be seeking to communicate with her. He is. And Murph’s enduring faith that her father loves her ultimately enables her to receive his message and save the entire human race.
Cooper is miraculously rescued and returned just in time to reunite with his daughter before her peaceful death—and to receive the gift of more life still before him, allowing him to once again venture out into the unknown to save Dr. Brand.
Scrooge, meanwhile, wakes to find that, “The spirits did it all in one night! Of course they can!” He has not missed Christmas morning, the dark shadows he witnessed have not come to pass, and he too has the whole future set unwritten before him.
Ebenezer finally reconciles what was once lost to time and heals the wounds of his past by making profound amends with the people in front of him. He treats his employees with dignity and kindness. He reaches out in relationship to his nephew Fred and his wife—a little present glimpse of the youthful romance he once cast aside, and the living memory of the sister he once loved. And perhaps most poetically: he becomes “a second father” for Tiny Tim, a poetic reflection of the lonely little boy he once was, and an opportunity to embrace and forgive his former self.
By the time both stories meet their ends, grace abounds. The Past, immutable as it might sometimes seem, may yet be redeemed in the fantastical realm of The Present.
Houston Coley is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and self-described “theme park theologian” currently living in Nashville, TN. He is the artistic director of a nonprofit called Art Within.
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