HE FORGETS WHO HE IS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13497, 25 May 1907, Page 1 (Supplement)

HE FORGETS WHO HE IS.

BY TOHT/NGA.

As a general rule we remember who we are, which prevents a great deal of unpleasantness, not only to ourselves but to others. Once in a while, however, this convenient memory; fails, and the man who forgets who he is wanders, aimlessly about the world, wondering where ho belongs and trying to remember his name. There is a suitable scientific name for the condition, but there isn't any suitable scientific or any other sort of name for -the way the poor fellow must feel. ; Nor for his feelings when memory returns to him, and he tries to! explain to the recovered wife of his bosom why he didn't come home, and what he has been doing with himself in the meanwhile. Many law-abiding citizens know the difficulty of thus explaining even an r hour " or two of absent-mindedness. Imagine the sorrows of the man who has to explain for a week or a year! It is a queer thing altogether. ; John Smith, or Mary Smith—for even • women sometimes forget, though more rarely— walks up the street on business and never comes back. He goes out to the Football Match, and that is the end of him.' Or he says he must go round to the barber's for a shave and haircut, and vanishes as though he had gone up in a balloon. And he turns up, perhaps, in London, working as a clerk in a warehouse; or in. the King Country, working as a navvy on the MainTrunk ; or out in Bombay, as a sailor. For sooner or later memory seems to come back as suddenly as it left. John Smith is recalled to his old recollections, as though he had been awakened from sleep, and is as helpless as anybody else to explain how he came to make a seeming fool of himself. And all this, so the scientists tell as, is because of some slight abnormal process in a little bit of the brain—a little clot of blood, a little dent in the skull, a little stretching of a nerve. So John Smith forgot who he was ; and when once he wanders from his usual beat there isn't anybody else who can tell him.

Queer, isn't it? John is absolutely sane, altogether the same old John, with all John's education and John's capabilities. His hands retain their old craft-skill. His mind is as keen and alert as ever. He walks, rides, speaks, thinks, as he did before. Only he has forgotten his name and his place in society. He does not know what his town is or his < street. He wouldn't know his •-wife if he saw her or the; house he has lived in for years. He does not know his friends'or his partners. In a word, he has lost his identity. He is alone in the world. He is, excepting for his acquirements, exactly as he was when ho was born. Now look what happens! : The man who has forgotten who he was finds himself alone in a strange world, homeless, friendless, moneyless, filled with a vague uneasiness, a blind craving for the past, which has closed behind him like a' wall. And Nature takes him in hand, as she does all her, children, and compels him with hard blows to win back the social place he has lost and forgotten. He does not know his name, but he hungers, /thinks*, tires; needs friends, occupation,' amusement, as much as he/needs food and drink and shelter. So he sets to ; work instinctively, automatically, to rebuild his , life, as' mote do , than we wot of "in a world that knows nothing of its neighbours. : It is riot an uncommon experience!, among our shifting English-speaking peoples, for a man to find himself alone in a strange Slace. Thousands in Auckland to-day, milons. in our English' world, have walked in a strange city knowing sot a single pi* dividual ■ "in it, 'yet'haviiig sbhiehow "to earn. their living, and ■.■ to//win their;•; way. ; And however brave they may be,/ however hopeful, however young and strong, there is not one;of them whose pride has not wavered at the loneliness of it, whose heart has not. ached a little/with longing for /the- place w'Here there "are friends. Not a hard-faced man of all our wandering-tribes whose eyes have not - been < wetted by a weakness ,■: he pretends to scorn 'and •• not a woman of us—for in 'these modern ? days • even our women go out into the world—who has not sobbed her heart/out for the loneliness that

' only.«' Time can heal. ; And we have our memories to aid us and to sustain us—memories beside which the ' greatest pictures iof . the greatest artists make - but a feeble show.:;.: .;,;.;,■,;•/:/;_ . .-,:■/".':•./:.'.

So precious to us are these memories,: that we often regard them as our real selves, Kind say that without them we should not be what we are. For in themi are recollections of the things that stirred us to the roots of our being of the emotional influences that moulded our personalities, as the potter moulds clay, of the revelations that come page iby page to all men and to all women, and that we each read: and interpret" for ourselves. So strong are they that they take us by the throat when least Ave expect them, and shake us again with sorrow or thrill us again with joy; the more so because we rarely speak of them, treasuring our dearest memories as a miser treasures his sacred gold. For in those memories the dead live and the /voices that are far away sound in our ears, and the lips that wo* love best, living or dead, cling wet and warm; to our own. That which takes our memory takes from us- the possession we hold dearestyet it is not our individuality, as we can see by the man who forgets who he is. ■ For John Smith — own name forgotten, his own identity lost, his own sens© of place in Time and the World gone, as though it had never been—is as much John Smith as ever. You can change the label as you like. You can call him Smith or Brown, English or American, Australian or New Zealander. You can have him forget the girl he loves and the mother who bore him and the.poundnote he lent to a friend. But he is still John.Smith. His instincts

are there and his qualities and his character and all that makes his personalitynot to mention the living soul which sonie of us still manage to believe in and which absorbs all the essential experiences of living, never to let them go. Wherefrom his loneliness, a loneliness beside which the grief of the stranger in the strange city is a mere passing discomfort, fit is one of the great tragedies of mankind, and possibly a typical tragedy—this of the man who forgets who he was. Somewhere, somewhere, under the blue sky, is the home his '.whole'' being dumbly craves for, the woman who is his mate, the child through whom his living is not in-vain, the social atmosphere in which he is content, seeking no other—and'he cannot reach it. If he asks, "Who am I?" they call him mad. If he says, " Where . did I come from?" they scoff at his drunkenness. And when he would' recall the past, knowing there is a past, he stares at a mist, and at the most only catches tantalising glimpses of what it hides. ' ,

And so John. Smith accepts the inevitable, and, as Peter Brown becomes another citizen. And nobody knows what he hides in his heart or the hopeless longing that he stifles, as men—and women, toohave stifled " hopeless longing, from the beginning of time—/-work, by drink, by religious i exercises, by backing a double, ;by getting |up early, bv staying out late, and by getting married. *. .

But why go on with the tragedy of the man who forgets who he is ? And after all there is very little tragedy in th© end unless he remembers. He holds his tongue and uses his wits—all the keener for the struggle he has had to make to regain a footing in society. He finds pleasure in the primitive joysin eating good food, in drinking good wine or good tea, in sleeping in a warm bed and in having fat men round him, "such as sleep o' nights." No whisper comes to him of the sorrow and trouble and hardship of her for whom he would have worn; his fingers to the bone —unless he wakes to find himself again John Smith. that, after all,;if he were wise he would never wish to remember anything, yet the desire to remember has ever been strong in the man Who forgets who he is.