It Is Easy To Fall Into The Delusion That The Few Things Thus
Distinctly Remembered And Visualized Are Precisely Those Which Were
Most Important In Our Life, And On That Account Were Saved By Memory
While All The Rest Has Been Permanently Blotted Out.
That is indeed
how our memory serves and fools us; for at some period of a man's
life - at all events of some lives - in some rare state of the mind, it
is all at once revealed to him as by a miracle that nothing is ever
blotted out.
It was through falling into some such state as that, during which I
had a wonderfully clear and continuous vision of the past, that I was
tempted - forced I may say - to write this account of my early years. I
will relate the occasion, as I imagine that the reader who is a
psychologist will find as much to interest him in this incident as in
anything else contained in the book.
I was feeling weak and depressed when I came down from London one
November evening to the south coast: the sea, the clear sky, the
bright colours of the afterglow kept me too long on the front in an
east wind in that low condition, with the result that I was laid up
for six weeks with a very serious illness. Yet when it was over I
looked back on those six weeks as a happy time! Never had I thought so
little of physical pain. Never had I felt confinement less - I who
feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of
sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly
alive!
On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative
ease, I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had
that far, that forgotten past with me again as I had never previously
had it. It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons,
when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some
flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and
so vividly that it is almost an illusion. That is an intensely
emotional condition and vanishes as quickly as it comes. This was
different. To return to the simile and metaphor used at the beginning,
it was as if the cloud shadows and haze had passed away and the entire
wide prospect beneath me made clearly visible. Over it all my eyes
could range at will, choosing this or that point to dwell on, to
examine it in all its details; and, in the case of some person known
to me as a child, to follow his life till it ended or passed from
sight; then to return to the same point again to repeat the process
with other lives and resume my rambles in the old familiar haunts.
What a happiness it would be, I thought, in spite of discomfort and
pain and danger, if this vision would continue!
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