DO YOU REMEMBER?

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4235, 24 January 1940, Page 8

DO YOU REMEMBER?

RECOLLECTIONS AND REALITY •Recent weeks have echoed with the phrase. Gatherings of families and of old friends are features of the seasons just commemorated, and all occasions furnish incitements to reminiscence. Inevitably there are stirrings of memories; conversations develop along lines which constitute an all-round summons to remember. Every such experience demonstrates afresh the fact that memory is probably the most freakish of the human faculties. Its lapses are almost hourly occurrences, and yet, quite unprompted, it will suddenly present with surprising vividness some trifle after long years of seeming forgetfulness. At fiie entrance upon another year, therefore, it is natural to wonder—if wo are spared to see the end of it—what we shall remember and what we shall seem to forget of the things that happen in it. Experience attests it is not necessarily the great events memory will retain. These are not unlikely to become an amorphous blur, while incidents almost irritating in their triviality will make a fog in the memory such as time will never erase.

Man is not at all the arbiter of what he will remember. In his effort to be so he has resorted to many a futile device from cutting hacks in the post to tying knots in. his handkerchief. That there was a limbo of forgotten things he was.

once confident. The place is nonexistent. Memory is an indelible record which some chance remark or incident may put into motion on our mental gramophone. Our ancestors, having no experience of the reality could not conceive the. analogy, but every normal persop has proved its soundness. The marvel is that memory serves so well, having regard to which it is subjected. There is the memory that is, mechanistically, as nearly as possible perfect. It is amazingly accurate and depressingly arid. It can recall at prescribed moments any extensive list of unrelated facts, an asset invaluable for examination-room purposes.

But not infrequently it is an indication that its owner is imaginatively a bankrupt and socially a bore. On everyone, however, there rests the obligation to cultivate memory to the maximum degree of efficiency. There is encouragement in the fact that no faculty is more responsive to the process; the compensations can at times be great. Few things are to some people more agreeable than the revelation that they have been pleasantly remembered through many intervening years. Permanent estrangements have arisen from the discovery that some who had thought they were oldfriends found themselves entirely forgotten.

The machinery of memory would seem to have a protective part which acts not to erase—never completely to erase—‘but to blur somewhat expediences that are ’unpleasant. It is a merciful provision; it is imperative to save average men and women fi cm chronic moral depression. “For each day brings its little dust, Our

soon-choked souls to fill. And we forget, because we must, And not because we will.'” It is always possible to remember too much, with consequences often painful and occasionally paralysing. An elderly Scottish farmer driving his gig came to a river in flood. He forced his horse to cross, and it got through just with its life. Later in !th,e year they returned to the river, {now running a trickle. The horse recognised the spot and shied. “Oh, get on,” said the philosopher in the gig, “Get on, beastie, your memory is better than your judgment.”

That state of mind has its human parallel. Memory can become a tyranny; it can be a weight as well as a wing. The capacity to carry about a miscellaneous collection of irrelevant reminiscences is not one that need excite envy. It may mean little more than a burdening of the consciousness and a preventing of other more important faculties functioning vigorously.

The archaeologists have unearthed evidence of mnemonic systems current in ancient Babylonian and_Egyptia civilisatios. Most of us can recall the crude rhymes that were ofttimes repeated in our childhood days to stimulate us to perform the soreadily forgotten duties and to practise the virtues that seemed so unattractive. Even after long years have passed, that hard-featured ciyt man, that socially atetive woman, if they had courage sufficient, could confess that they have their own home-made and often absurd expedients for summoning the resources of memory in some moment of emergency. It has to be recognised that

memorising is in quite a different category from remembering; the latter has a human quality, the former represents a human appoximation to an adding machine.

Some such as Lord Macaulay’s, have b™n capable of achievements that "Would be discredited if not so fully authenticated. It was safd of Lord Tennyson that if the works of Shakespeare had disappeared from the earth he could have almo n * entirely replaced them from memory. The late Lord Birkenhead was one of those men who are said to be able to gain and to retain the whole purport of a printed page at a glance. Such feats might w’ell serve to keep ordinary mortals humble. But they are quite unrelated to the spirit of the old friend as he asks: “Do you remember?” Thjat spirit is personal, affectionate and wistful. The one covetable type of memory is that whose possessor has striven to retain only “those things which are pure, lovely and of good report.” The years move on, and, moving, they invest the good things we rememiher with richer beauty, with deeper meaning. For the memory is no exclusive storehouse of facts upon which some few may expertly draw. Rather is it a path along which', at leisure and at will, all may happily wander. And as that path grows longer, its end nearer, the reflective person realises with increasing clearness that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” Far wealthier 'in the most satisfying sense are they who can without remorse turn over their store of memories and whose eyes gleam brighter, whose hearts feel happier each time they encounter the kindly query: Do you renjember?