MY BAD MEMORY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLIV, Issue 14704, 3 June 1920, Page 6

MY BAD MEMORY.

(By Hilgar Wood.) |

iTho many'advertisements offering systems, and training suggest that memory is a gift worth ■ cultivating. Men buttonhole lis, in the advertising pages, hjkl say, in effect: "You have a memory ■of sorts; let us make it a good one." That is all so.;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. You .-will have guessed right-. We all want our . memories trained, and train them to be bad —a clumsy and unscientific way of describing the Artof Forgetting, but one that will arrest your attention more surely—is very valuable. I do not suggest that your first experiments in cultivating; a bad memory should lie in the direction of forgetting your own name and address, so that wellwishers send you out each morning with a label round your neck, for 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 is 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 easily 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 wer<s 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 bis men. This great General could 'put all the cares and problems of a campaign out of his mind, and snatch a half-hour of 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 and Cabinet as soon as he had turned his back on them for home. If you met him at dinner lie would discuss the novel or the play of the hour as though his only cares were with the lighter side of life. a It happens to be the one fact that comes clear and unchallengeable out of the strife and confusion and mixed ideas in Ireland, that- if Irishmen had not such extraordinarily good memories the Irish problem might have been settled before you or 1 were born. T would arrest as a disturber of the peace the man who tries to sell in Ireland a system for making good memories, 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 011 the head — should have a statue in Gonnemara marble on St. Stephen's Green. I do not suggest that good memories are the only disturbing elements in Ireland —I.happen to know Ireland too well to suppose that a cure for her problems eaii 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 '>e gloriously forgotten. There are wide stretches of Ireland where they remember Cromwell at Wexford far more vividly than thev remember French at Y pre si Cromwell is a clear 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 rumors of another world. Yes, much of "the Irish problem is a tragedy of memory—an .unhappy knack of playinsr to-day's game with pieces that should have been forgotten and for the rest of the world are dead. Most of us are just as bad. We may not take sides now over that, little controversy near Hastings in 1066, and if I want to quarrel with my neighbor—a pleasant and invigorating pursuit—l.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 jve are left free to quarrel over the garden wall, when the. state of our health demands such hygienic outlet, about the quality of our peas and rhubarb, or the habits of our dogs and hens. Which is very agreeable while it lasts, and is soon over. 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 co'vers the scarred earth with delicate green and 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 —though he is to be pitied for never having had common share in man's common sorrows, and never having walked as man with men. But for the rest of us, as we lie down at night, or go about our tasks by day, leh us, for our peace and comfort, have bad memories for the worries and anxieties and sorrows .of the past.