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Remembering, Etc.
Harper’s Weekly (February 18, 1911) : 21
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      To recollect with skill is a most pleasing pastime, and some old gentlemen with glowing, absent eyes impress one as owing their charm solely to the talent they have for remembering and the flavored zest with which they cultivate it. All the blank later years of their life are made full by the embroidery of past events. Trivial impressions come to them refined and illumined by the fine haze of distance through which they have passed, and the ruminant gentlemen bear about with them a shimmering, translucent quality caused by the resurrected happenings in which they live. Things we have felt once seem so ready and glad to be recalled to our consciousness. We apparently have all that we have ever acquired. Even the glimpses so evanescent that eyes yearned over them in the seeing and the losing — we have them with the sweetened pang of fearing we could not hold them. It is just a matter of enriching arid spaces with backward journeys, and we pass, spirit-light, through series of impressions, blurred in the original getting by bodily fatigue and petty inconveniences. With a clarity and keenness we surely could not have had then, yet must have — for how else could everything have bitten so sharply into our memories? — we pass along the streets of cities, recalling every turn, finding our way with sure steps along covered alleys and under archways, seeing domes framed between jutting gray walls, eyeing uncomprehendingly strange types and meaningful cryptic figures. It is as though the length of time during which memories lie fallow in the brain were all used by them to refurbish and make themselves of greater vividness, so that it becomes a real loss and positive cruelty not to take them out years afterward and retrace with them many slow processes, giving them full credit for the care and fine artistry with which they have weeded away all but the essence. It all comes back augmented by details we were not conscious of catching at the time, and, when we finally reach the open square and cross it to lean on the stone parapet, we have again the precise feel of the air as it came to us from the warm plains below, and again our eyelids quiver with the effort of intoxicated eyes to make their own each detail of the sun and shadow.
      It is as though the length of time during which memories lie fallow in the brain were all used by them to refurbish and make themselves of greater vividness, so that it becomes a real loss and positive cruelty not to take them out years afterward and retrace with them many slow processes, giving them full credit for the care and fine artistry with which they have weeded away all but the essence. There are just the things one would like best to remember kept ready at one’s service. The thousand absurdities seen from the top of a Parisian ’bus, the bubble of one’s mood, the care-free poverty that could afford nothing and so played audience to all these are preserved to one intact. Oddly enough, it is never what we hear that we contrive to retain with mosaic perfection. Sounds melt and we keep but the emotion into which they resolved themselves. It is the same with books read and ideas discussed. The sequence of words goes: what stays for us forever is the thing seen and drunk in so deeply it seems to have been seen with the heart, and, above all, we keep the mood, that jewel into which the entire moment was burned in the crucible of sensitiveness. Looking back over one’s life and perhaps this should not be made general, for it may differ with each of us the feel of the air, the way lights caressed the landscape, an almost drunken delight in the number of details that stood out from the whole, but by their shared brilliancy resolved themselves back into the big sweep: this and a perfectly clear diagnosing consciousness of one’s receptivity to it all make up the general trend and weave. It may be that the things seen are less clear than the memory one has, reaching back to the first beginnings, of knowing how vibrantly one was aware. The fact of being alive to the entire overpowering mass, this was always striking above everything else, and so, quaintly enough, our memory is repeatedly of the same thing — of cognizance. All other recollections are but proofs and reminders of how truly at certain moments this was so. And it is just to recall keenness that we most want when we are ill or dull or idle or old. To brace ourselves in our slackness or senility with the knowledge that things, myriads of things, happened to us once upon a time, and that we revelled in them and enjoyed them to the uttermost, is such genuine comfort. We are soothed and flattered by our diplomatic and indulgent memory. The past tides us over to the future, and the fact that it is graciously able and willing to do so is always one virtue to be attributed to the present.

      Mr. W. D. Hudson, in his A Shepherd’s Life, says, with an assurance that permits of no doubt and no contradiction, that the adaptability of Nature is such that, on a down where sheep are grazing, herbs will grow small and close to the ground, covering their flowers with their leaves, spreading themselves flat and thin in an effort to protect themselves from being nibbled, and that the same plants, when the sheep have been removed, will grow tall, shooting up on slim stalks, flaunting their flowers and waving themselves about with all the plump complacency of a perfectly secure herb. It has been a long time since an idea has seemed so full of winsome surprises and possibilities. Do the herbs cower for some time after the sheep have left; then stretch themselves a mere half inch just to see what can have happened to the devouring creatures that used to threaten them so often...? Do the herbs cower for some time after the sheep have left; then stretch themselves a mere half inch just to see what can have happened to the devouring creatures that used to threaten them so often, and, seeing nothing, rear and rear, looking all about until convinced of a clear horizon, change the habits of a summer or two and spread themselves comfortably? What if they bring up their children to grow in the same soaring manner and the sheep return unexpectedly and they are, one and all, eaten to the ground? One would very much like to know if in the following summer the roots would have heard in some way of the unhappy dénouement and would again send forth cautious plants with the instinct to cling close to the ground. We hope Mr. Hudson’s theory is based on fact. We should hate to have any doubt cast upon this revelation of a heretofore unguessed characteristic on the part of nature, but we admit that countless queries crowd to our lips. What if a false alarm were given, if some nefarious thorn-tree or passing bird let fly the news that the sheep had gone never to return, when it knew right well in its black heart that other sheep were to replace those departed in the space of a few days? Could the plants, on discovering their mistake and before it was too late, make their long stems collapse like telescopes and wiggle, with many gasps and much palpitation, back into their former inconspicuous positions, and, if such is the case, could one really blame a thorn-tree? To see such a sight in a life otherwise dull would richly compensate one for any little twinge of conscience that resulted, particularly if the herbs managed it in time.
 

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