MEMORY

Memory, they say is both a blessing and a curse. Is there a more pleasurable moment than reliving those events in our lives --- the thrill of viewing a face that made us weak at the knees; for mountain climbers, the wide expanse of green and blue and a sea of other hues viewed from a mountain top, the memories are as varied as people are varied. Whatever our memories are, they give us a chance to relive those days that are irretrievably gone. In other words, memory is the nemesis of time; memory is the formalin that preserves the past that gives a profound dimension to our lives.

So we can see, in Hemingway’s short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro (a high mountain in Africa) the hunter-hero lying in his cot, sick and waiting for death. He remembers his great love, dining with her in a resto in Paris and enjoying a Flamenco dance by a group from Spain.

He remembers the bull-fights in Spain, the graceful swirl of the cape of the matador as he teases the bull to a definite frustration.

Other memories, all against the view of Mt. Kilimanjaro whose upper flanks are white with snow.

That is why we dread the advent of Alzheimer – which makes us robots and reduces us to a mass of un-thinking flesh and bones. President Ronald Reagan, in the twilight of his life, presumably could not remember the momentous events of his administration, the time that he was shot by a crazed young man. According to news reports, President Reagan could not recognize his children (all of them?). The more moving aspect of all is that even in the darkness of his mind, Reagan still knew Nancy.

So when does memory become a curse? Maybe it’s when memory grasps at the tragedies, major and minor, of our lives. Some of us may weep and pine for a love which is gone forever. Remembrance becomes a curse when it nurtures resentment, when it blocks forgiveness, when it blackens our days. The art consists of what to remember and what to forget.

In a sense, even history, for all its hoary eminence, is simply an organized and a systematization of human memory, buttressed by documents, reports, videos and the rest.

Gibbon’s work, “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” is a stupendous

exercise of human memory that spans about one millennium and a half of Roman greatness, the vices and virtues of a long line of Emperors, the attacks of the barbarians, the bread and circus in Rome to assuage the misery of the poor.

But then, that happened a long time ago and without memories reduced to writing, the events of the Roman Empire would have sunk into the pit of forgetfulness.

Can one glimpse the lessons granted by memory? One stands out – that we can not seem to learn from past events. As they say, those who forget the lessons of the past are bound to repeat the mistakes. Had human nature been malleable it would have yielded to the voices and lessons of the past. But no, we continue to have wars, we continue to ferment corruption, greed, over-weening, ambition. We are surprised that slavery still exist in many pockets of this planet (Thank you CNN for trying to eradicate it).

And we go our way sometimes remembering, sometimes forgetting.

As for me I have to remember to stop.*

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