VALUE OF FORGETTING.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume X, Issue 154, 15 June 1920, Page 2

VALUE OF FORGETTING.

BAD MEMORY CONVENIENT.

WHY GRIEVANCES SURVIVE

The many advertisements offering systems of training suggest that memory is a gift worth cultivating. Men buttonhole us, in the advertising pages, and say, in effect: “You have a memory of sorts: let us make it a good one” (writes Henry Hilgar in the Daily Chronicle). That is also very good and proper that no one would wish to say a word against it—except to plead that it may sometimes be worth while to have a bad memory, and to train it to be bad. That seems so absurd a statement that if you have carefully studied the absurd, as you should do. you will guess at once that there must be a rich strain of truth in it Yon will have guessed right. JVe all want our memories trained, and to train them to bo bad—a slumsy and unscientific wgy of describing the Art of Forgetting, but one that will arrest your attention more surely—is very valuable. DON’T OVF.RDO IT.

I do not suggest that your first experiments in cultivating a bad memory should lie in the direction of forgetting vour own name and address, so that well-wishers send you out every morning with a label round your neck, ior the use of kindly constables and cabmen who may desire to restore you to your friends. But to be able to forget—to have such a bad memory for some things that it is as though they had never happened—-that it to rise above the fret and worry of the world and to walk in high places. So far as I have been able to discover a memory that can be bad at will—again using a clumsy but easy grasped phrase to describe a memory that can let go at the right time—has been a mark of all great men. The memory that stores up masses of unnecessary trifles—as if I were to remember all the dates of history, and the names and majorities of all the M.P.’s, when I have reference books at my elbow—is a mark of the other kind of men. Study the lives of the big men. This great general could put all the cares and problems of a campaign out or his mind, and snatch a half-hour ot sleep on a cloak by the roadside. He was the stronger and abler for cultivating the art of forgetting. Another man, a statesman, could forget all the harassing worry of Parliament ana Cabinet as soon as he had turned bis back on them for home. If you met him at dinner he would discuss the novel or the play of the hour as though his only cares were with the lighter sides of life. It happens to be the one fact that comes clear and unchallengeable out of the strife and confusion and mixed ideas of Ireland, that if Irishmen had not such extraordinary good memories the Irish problem might have been settled before you or I were born. I would arrest as a disturber of tho peace, the man who tries to sell in Ireland a system of making good memeries. If I did not know already that his wares are not needed there. But the man with a thoroughly sound system for making bad memories—provided that his system did not depend on a bullet in the heart or a crack on the head—should have a statue in Connemara marble on St. Stephen’s Green. IRISHMEN’S MEMORIES.

I do not suggest that good memories are the only disturbing elements Hi Ireland—l happen to know Ireland too well to suppose that a cure for her problems can be put in a sentence. But it is a fact that an Irishman has a most awkward memory for distant events and for people who should be gloriously forgotten There are wide stretches of Ireland where they remember Cromwell at "W exford far more vividly than they remember French at Ypres. Cromwell is a cleat; fact, to be used in argument to-day as though his doings were in the morning papers; such little affairs as the more recent disturbances in Flanders are but. the vague and unimportant rumours of another world. Yes, much of the Irish problem is a tragedy of memory— an unhappy knack of playing to-day’s game with pieces that should have been forgotten long ago—of uttering battle cries that for the rest of the worfd are dead. Most-of us are just as bad. We may not take sides now over that little con; troversy near Hastings in 1066, and if I want a quarrel with my neighbour—a pleasant and invigorating pursuit— I do not abuse him because he is for .Charles or Cromwell, or because he is on the wrong side in the Cain and Abel dispute. . I know that such far-off affairs have ceased to echo down the corridors of his mind—that, so far as they are concerned, he has a bad memory. So we are left free to quarrel over the garden wall, when the state of our health demands such hygenic outlet, about the quality of our peas and rhubarb, or tho habits of our dogs and hens. Which is very agreeable while it lasts, and is soon over. NO HATE IN NATURE.

Nature, who is very old and very wise, arranges this memory business very well. Give her a free and undisturbed hand on our old battlefields for a little while, and see how she crumbles trench and parapet, and covers the scarred earth with delicate green aiid gold. There is no stored hate in Nature, no memory for things better forgotten, no pricking of old sores—only the kindliness and charity of a bad memory. There may be a man who has never known grief and disaster and disappointment. Let him have good memories if he will—tliough he is to be pitied for never having had common share in man’s common sorrows, and never having walked a.s man with men. But for the rest of us. as we lie down at night, or go about our tasks by day. let us, for our peace and comfort, have bad memories for the worries and anxieties and sorrows of the past.