Florida Pier : writings and about       /       jmcvey.net

Mementos
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (June 3, 1911) : 25
U Michigan copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
 

      No genuinely sentimental person keeps mementos. A sentimental person is one who likes to sweeten the future with of the past, and whose first thought is to protect himself from any disillusion regarding aught in his life that has savored of the exquisite. Now nothing is as disillusioning as a memento. It is bald, unchanging. It refuses to take on that enhancing vagueness and beautifying reinterpretation which our memory manages with such ease to give to things that are past. To attach a rare experience or an alluring encounter to a letter is to reduce it to nothing more than a scrap of paper on which are written lines that once seemed pregnant with meaning but are now empty, conventional, and a shade mediocre in phrasing.
      To have the most graceful things which have happened to us represented by objects of no beauty and little real symbolism is to refuse to those occasions most richly deserving the aid which our memory stands so ready to give them. To have the most graceful things which have happened to us represented by objects of no beauty and little real symbolism is to refuse to those occasions most richly deserving the aid which our memory stands so ready to give them. The excuse for such a guarding of heterogeneous small objects is that in old age one will warmly enjoy looking them over. But the way to face old age with its happiness assured is to stand divested of mementos, trusting to that tender inaccuracy with which we always regard the past, to do its greatest for our ruminative moments.
      There is something heavy-handed in keeping a ghastly clock because you and your husband bought it years ago together, and he has since died. It is to be daily reminded of the crudity of your young mutual task, whereas, if the clock were made away with, you could laugh lovingly at those monstrous early blunders, all their terrors happily discounted by the beauty of what has since replaced them.
      A hot and perfectly justifiable resentment is felt if it is discovered that we have been treasured in the form of a soiled glove or dishearteningly dowdy photograph. We feel the unfairness of the person who, pretending to cherish our finest essence, thus niggardly held on to an indiscretion of our past. If he appreciate us more than others, it is for him, above every one, to take into account our yearly increment and to think of us as augmented, with lovely extensions which he should have the generosity to take on trust, though circumstances prevent his seeing us, or seeing us with the intimate eye once permitted him. At the time the treasured letter or photograph was received we read into it beauties a third person might have thought us mad to take so contentedly for granted. This makes by itself a sufficient reason why it should have been destroyed shortly after. Our very feeling for it ought to have prompted us to save it from a time when it would be looked at without the assistance we prodigally gave it in the beginning. >At the time the treasured letter or photograph was received we read into it beauties a third person might have thought us mad to take so contentedly for granted. This makes by itself a sufficient reason why it should have been destroyed shortly after. Our very feeling for it ought to have prompted us to save it from a time when it would be looked at without the assistance we prodigally gave it in the beginning. The preserver of mementos appears, now that we have looked at him carefully, a person of inconceivable hardness of heart — one who almost treacherously gives life a chance to pass as paltry.

The Sleepy Housekeeper’s Dilemma
      A French scientist once said in a Sunday newspaper — Sunday newspapers would not be half as readable as they are if the obliging scientists did not contribute so generously and picturesquely — that it was dangerous to spring from a sound sleep and commence living at full speed. He even intimated that insanity might possibly result if a cold plunge were taken immediately after waking, his point being that the difference between sleep and wide-awake activity was so great. It is just this difference that, on his mentioning it, we recognized with leaping response. The difference is profound; it naturally cannot be safe to bridge it too rapidly. It should be broken to us gently; a day is a thing we must be reintroduced to gradually. Twelve minutes between absolute oblivion and pouring morning coffee for people with alert appetites is not enough. One’s whole being is in protest and cries out: “But, good gracious! does no one realize that a mere second ago I was lost to the world, non-existent?[”] To come from nothingness into full remembrance of how many lumps people take, and interest in extracts from the morning paper, as well as appreciation of fish and preference for lemon or no lemon — it is too much, truly. I am jarred to the center of my ego, there is a something cataclysmic in such a process. It is like thinking you were a mossy hill and finding yourself an erupting volcano. It is not so much the volcano that makes you erupt as your dismay and general discouragement. The French scientist must be right; to be rushed into wakefulness in such a precipitate manner is dangerous.

Rabbits and Periwinkles
      The laws of nature are cternally disquieting. When baby rabbits play on the lawn, looking like birds grown too fat to fly, one feels they are the most bewitching objects in the world. Their infantile roundness and trick of turning their back when they hear you, as though a rear view were a thing invisible to the human eye Their infantile roundness and trick of turning their back when they hear you, as though a rear view were a thing invisible to the human eye, are attributes rendering them such delicious babies that it seems impossible they should be grandfathers in the fewest possible weeks. You tiptoe about for fear of disturbing them, and worship the brown dots they make in the sunlight. Then suddenly periwinkles planted by you are discovered in a state of nibbled desolation, and forget-me-nots that were just getting ready to have buds of their own are found gnawed and reduced to ragged roots. Your leaden heart unfolds the suspicion that sin and iniquity are contained in those infinitesimal brown bundles. You still adore them, but there is a, something — not precisely a reservation or an arrière pensée, but a faint gray fear that the world may not be arranged as perfectly as it might be. Then one day your terrier shoots past, a white streak of muscular energy and brute intention, and afterward you see him looking hypocritically aloof and unconcealably content. You look at that terrier and wonder if he ought to be thrashed. You look at your periwinkles and wonder and wonder and wonder.
 

20260904