Gift of Memory, The

Spiritual Life, Fall 2004 by Matthews, William R

THIS AFTERNOON, MY EYES DAMP, I came up to my desk from a walk around the college track. Ahead of me in the adjacent lane, hand in hand, a white-haired couple had ambled along as Irene and I once did. We delighted in traveling together: walking, running, flying cross-country and abroad. Now if our children and grandchildren in Maine and California need more contact with us than phone calls, snail and E-mail, they must travel themselves. For many folks our age, moderate immobility means television, reading, and occasional eating out. But we have a rich resource within: God's gift of memory.

Saint Augustine wrote in his Confessions:

All this goes on inside me, in the vast cloisters of my memory. In it are the sky, the earth, and the sea, ready at my summons, together with everything I have ever perceived in them by my senses.... The power of the memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast immeasurable sanctuary.1

I rejoice in the gift of memory, relive the past through it, and assemble the jigsaw puzzle of life's events into new, interlocking dramatic wholes. Life is an exciting drama, especially poignant when we part the curtains of inattention and watch our own story enacted before us on our own stage. Some scenes are painful-but they are past-and the pain eases when we remember their bearing on the next act. My heart was broken when I lost my first love. But without the heartbreak, there would be no beloved wife of fifty-nine years.

God blesses us with the ability to observe how all experience adds colored threads to the rich tapestry of our lives. Time brings not repetition but newness, which is why I delight in the classics. The first time I read Charles Dickens's Bleak House, I was a graduate student at Ohio State, flat on my back in bed with the flu. That memory deepens today's rereading of the novel. Hearing a CD of the "Pastoral Symphony" last night recalled a time in Chicago when I listened to Beethoven's music hand in hand with my beloved. Through memory, we mine deeper and deeper into the cavern of ourselves. Henry David Thoreau says this in his essay "Walking":

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.2

I used to tell my graduating college seniors, only half facetiously, "From now on it's all downhill." How wrong I was.

Memory does more than enrich current moments; it helps make sense of our lives. I need only to run my pen across paper and the past floods my present. I am again a five-year-old in a sailor suit with a toy watering can, sprinkling the flowers on a grandfather's new grave. I feel once more the supreme softness of that first shy touching of a girl's lips, sitting in the summer night's dark on a porch swing. I experience again the pressure of my dissertation advisor's hand when he emerged from the examination committee's meeting room to announce I had earned a doctorate. I sit here at my desk this humid July morning, with the God-given power to summon up all manner of things-good and bad, comic and tragic-all present although physically absent. Iris Origo in Images and Shadows: Part of a Life writes:

Man is one world, and hath

Another to attend him.3

That World Is Memory

Michael Dirda, who writes about books for the Washington Post, suggests that one should search the library shelves for intriguing novels at least fifty years old. The time depicted in such stories is not time past to me at all. I hear a scratchy recording of the Andrews Sisters singing "Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me," and I am transported back to the time when I was with the 34th Infantry Division in North Africa and the girl I loved was in the Shenandoah Valley, daughter of an orchard foreman. I first saw "King Kong" at a matinee in the 1930s in the old Oriental Theater in Chicago, sitting by my father, who was estranged from my mother. Last week a rerun on TCM brought that summer back. Watching "Things to Come," I relive my lonely, imaginative boyhood when I first became aware of science fiction. My faith itself is based on memory-recollecting what God has done for his people-a symbol for what he still does and eternally will do. Age shapes and deepens experience by the gift of memory. So long as we live, we are a totality of time-hallowed things.

Fred again sings to an achingly young, effervescent Ginger,

The way you wear your hat, / The way you sip your tea,

The memory of all that, / They can't take that away from me.

Now, I don't ignore the present-the pressure of my pen on yellow paper, the chatter of birds outside the skylight window-these are enriched by recollections of bird songs and writing sessions in the past. What a profound blessing to have almost the whole of the past century and the first years of this one stored in my mind: the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, World War II, the Fifties, Vietnam, the protests of the Sixties and Seventies, the current narcissism, and holiness of money. Eight decades accompany me daily.