'We Look Before and After'
I HAD picked up casually a book which lay on my friend’s table. It was Bertrand Russell’s Mysticism and Logic, and my eye fell on the following sentence, which I read aloud: ‘We all regard the past as determined simply by the fact that it has happened; but for the accident that memory works backward and not forward, we should regard the future as equally determined by the fact that it will happen.’
My friend made a wry movement of his lips, but a luminous expression appeared in his eye, and he said, with somewhat exaggerated matter-of-factness, ’I suffered an accident once which had the effect of making my memory work forward instead of back.’
‘You did!’ I exclaimed. ‘What a peculiarly unfortunate accident it must have been!’
‘Why do you say so?’
‘Well, I should have thought it would be a depressingly hopeless position to see the future arrayed before you, and to know that everything unpleasant in it was unavoidable. Why, you would have suffered all your griefs before you felt them, and yet you would have known that they were still to come! And the pleasures you might have enjoyed anticipating would be past before you experienced them. And then, think too of the loss of the entire past. Griefs themselves are said to be agreeable in retrospect, while everybody knows that chinning over the joys of the days that are no more is one of the inalienable privileges of middle-aged success.’
‘You speak plausibly, but superficially,’ said my friend. ‘The effect of the accident that turned my memory forward instead of back was not quite as you describe it. Sorrows remembered are, as you say, often turned into a kind of sentimental joy. But you must not neglect the fact that real pains tend to be forgotten. So, although my memory was directed to the future, I was quite unaware of most of the really painful incidents that were to befall me, as a child has to be told by his elders of diseases suffered in early infancy. I never could recall, for example, that I was to lose most of my money through unfortunate investments in the great panic which I knew to be coming in 1943 — or was it 1946? My memory was never of the best, whether my reminiscences were of the future or the past. As for my approaching attack of appendicitis, the first time that memory presented its circumstances to me they were painfully vivid; but, like most recollections of the sort, they soon slipped from my mind, and the nearer the actual occasion approached, the harder it was for me to recall the agonies I had suffered from it. The impending loss of my teeth and hair as I grew older was similarly removed from my mind by the blessed power of forgetfulness. I had an excellent memory, however, for all the misfortunes of this sort which the future held for my friends, and I enjoyed malignantly every recollect ion of their approaching decline, especially when it preceded my own.
‘Not only were most of my appointed evils mercifully spared me, but my pleasures were surrounded with delightful uncertainty. For you must know that memory is a fallible organ always, and I never felt sure of any of the welcome prospects to which I could look forward. Was it the Robinsons or the Hancocks who, ten years hence, had invited me to spend a week at their summer palace at French Lick? And was it at French Lick, or at Hot Springs? Often the event delightfully surprised me, and revealed the extent to which a capricious memory had misled my thoughts. And as I never believed in courses to strengthen my powers of remembering, I cultivated with a good conscience the habit of useful vagueness.
‘Nor was it of such disadvantage as you suppose to have lost the past altogether. No inferiority complex, born of domination by elder brothers in early life, or dinned into me by righteously overbearing parents, could check the buoyancy of my mind or dull the confidence with which I mingled with my fellow men. No haunting infantile shames or rankling unquiet conscience could interfere with the joy of the moment or restrict the free use of my faculties. No one could show me a photograph of myself in petticoats and expect me to be embarrassed, for I had no sense of a personal history, with its sorry weight of errors and weaknesses. On the contrary, instead of recalling the puny picture of my youth, I remembered the appearance I had come to wear in my old age, and, faulty as it was, I could rejoice that I should have more dignity on leaving the world than I brought at my entrance into it.
‘The past was all a delightful mystery, a veil which I fell it would be impious to raise or to wish to raise. I did not know whence I had come, or by what strange paths my neighbors and I had arrived at our present situation and habits. Yet I was not ignorant of the forces that govern human events, nor unfamiliar with the causes that operate in human life, for all these were spread before me in the future. I had the memory of what was to come to guide me, and could discern where men were going if not whence they had started. After all, it is a question which half of time shall be blank. Perhaps there is not much to choose. Personally I always detested history, and I feel that it is one of the most serious embarrassments attending an individual man or a nation to know his past. Consider how much more freely and wisely the world could act if it were unaware of the follies and hatreds it has accumulated in forty-odd centuries of recorded time!
‘Of course, most men find it one of the principal pleasures of life to recall their early days and to dwell with maudlin affection on the past. But I need not remind you that, usually the past which they delight to recall never existed, and that their exploits and adventures are largely produced by the imagination of the moment. I am as free as anyone in this respect, and my powers of invention are as lively. If my recollections were of events that had not yet occurred, they were none the less glamorous and sentimental. And I lied as bravely about the future as other men about the past.
‘On the whole,’ said my friend, ‘I don’t consider my accident a misfortune. I think you must agree with me that it had its uses.’
‘But you have now recovered from it?’ I asked.
‘ Perfectly,’ he assured me.
‘And you prefer your present state?'
‘How can I say? I am glad to have experienced both states. And at best any human faculty is but a faint candle gleaming uncertainly in the midst of darkness and mystery. If it play forward or back, hither or yon, the dilference is not much.’
OUR EDUCATIONAL TABLECLOTH
IT is our usual custom to spend our summers and an occasional winter week-end in our camp, a log cabin, simple, but commodious enough for comfort. Since our object is chiefly to escape for a time from the monotonous conventions of ordinary social life, we try to reduce our housekeeping duties to the lowest possible terms of simplicity.
Personal cleanliness is easy enough, for there is always the lake, and swimming is one of the pleasures of summer life. One’s body linen, too, must of course be washed regularly; but table linen is a different matter. The thing itself is only a convention, and a comparatively modern one at that. The baronial halls of feudal days knew nothing of it, and those were the very times when knighthood was in flower. We therefore determined to see if we could not dispense with it. White oilcloth should serve us instead. It would not have to be washed. A few swipes with a damp cloth would restore it to pristine spotlessness.
But when we tried it we found that hot dishes cockled it, that blueberry and black berry stains resisted the damp cloth, and that the enamel cracked along the edges. We disliked bare boards; and besides, they had to be scrubbed. Then, partly by accident, we hit upon our great discovery.
It was Nora, our maid, who did it. She happened one day to spread a newspaper over the table that she was laying for a hurried luncheon before we were to set out on an afternoon hike. The meal seemed to be passing in unusual silence. Looking up, I discovered that each of the others was not only eating but also reading, as I had been.
The portion of the paper that happened to lie in front of me contained the picture of a pretty girl and an article on the value of sage tea in preventing the hair from turning gray, a subject to which I had never before given any thought — the sage tea, I mean. The Lady of the Camp seemed to be absorbed in trying to determine the chances of the Wisconsin Wildcat against Red Mike Morrisey in what was described as a coming ‘mill.’
When we got back to camp that evening the table was still covered with newspapers, but on sitting down to supper we found that they were not the same ones. Nora had removed the top layer and thus exposed a fresh literary menu. This time my portion disclosed the fact that marabou-trimmed negligees were to be had for twenty-eight fifty, in heavy beige or orchid crêpe de Chine, lined with silk and interlined with wool. The Lady of the Camp was puzzling over the description of a new hydraulic dredge, which, she said, made no mention of how to get the flour into it.
Since then, whenever we have been in camp, we have continued, to our great satisfaction, the practice of using newspapers for tablecloths. Our papers come to us a day or two late — just long enough after publication to prevent the world from being too much with us, and just soon enough to keep us within sound of the band. At home we give them only a brief selective attention; but in camp it is different. As
so we read what we find beside ours.
The process is broadening and educational. In the city one grows so accustomed to reading certain parts of the paper and neglecting others that the mind gets into ruts. In camp there is always the element of surprise. Nuggets of thought gleam from the most unexpected corners. There is Violet Ray’s column, for example. I had never given any attention to it before, but now, when I am so fortunate as to draw it in the literary lottery, I always find in it some fundamental, incontrovertible truth that I can cling to. ‘There are many things to be said in favor of keeping our bureau drawers neatly arranged. It indicates a sense of order and a respect for our possessions.’ ‘ How much there is to know in the world, and how little we know or ever can know!’
Hazel Nutt has also had a deep and chastening influence on my life. ‘Every woman,’ she says, ‘should stand in front of her mirror at least once every month with an all-seeing eye’; and again, ‘No woman can understand men, even the specimen she spends her life with.’ Two well-balanced ideas, you will note. If I am a little disturbed by thoughts of what that all-seeing eye may discover, I am reassured by the second statement, even though ‘she’ has ‘no woman’ for its antecedent.
And then there is the Household Column, another department that I had always neglected, but that is now a constant source of pleasure and profit. It was there that I found the excellent receipt for prune nog, contributed by ‘Woolly Lamb’ in return for directions for making a molasses pie, offered by ‘Silver Threads.’ But it has its shadows, too, that column. So far as we have discovered, no one of the ‘sisters’ who contribute to it has been able to offer any suggestion that would cure ‘Pond Lily’s’ husband of a habit that annoys her. ‘He is good and kind,’ she writes, ‘and always wipes his feet and brings me his pay envelope every week; but he will crumb his doughnuts into his coffee and eat them with a spoon.’ You can easily see by her name t hat ‘Pond Lily’ is of a sensitive and refined nature, whereas ‘he’ most likely answers to the name of Jake or Bill, has large hands with reddish hair on the back of them, and on Sunday mornings likes to sit in undershirt, trousers, and stocking feet and read the sporting news. ‘Pond Lily’ will never understand him.
We find too that, when read to the leisurely accompaniment of a camp meal, items that we should ordinarily pass with hardly a thought are sometimes provocative of deep meditation, so that we carry them with us in our minds and debate their meaning. ‘ Boy Drowns While Skating on River.’ ‘Man Fractures Skull as He Falls from Staging.’ Here, as you will see, is room for argument. Is death by drowning a glacial rather than, as we had supposed, an aquatic tragedy? And did the man knock his head against the wall on the way down? How else could he have fractured his skull ‘as he fell’? We have not been able to decide.
And, having seen a number of skiing upsets, we have wondered if there was not a hidden meaning in an item that we found in the Fashion Column: ‘A very smart skiing costume consists of five pieces, and is both practical and good-looking enough to convince even the most timid sportswoman that there is more in the sport than appears on the surface.’
But all other parts of the paper grow tiresome and pall on the mental appetite before the attractions of the advertising pages, especially those devoted to real estate and secondhand—I should say ‘reconditioned’ — automobiles. They alone never grow stale and monotonous, but retain their zest and flavor as bacon does in the diet.
Must listen to this one!’ exclaims Bob, who loves the country: ‘“Oldfashioned house of eight rooms, fireplaces, near state highway, beautiful view of lake, boating, bathing, fishing, large barn, carriage shed, room for 400 hens, 40 acres high land, plenty wood, timber to pay for place, trout-brookwatcred meadow. Can better be imagined than described. Only $1500. $200 down.” ’
It is one of the delights of living in New England that every farm has a trout-brook-watered meadow or at least a spring-fed brook, provides boating, bathing, and fishing, and can better be imagined than described — many of them much better.
And there are the bungalows. They may have been designed by the man who put the bungle in bungalow, and built by an Italian shoemaker; and they may stand so close together that you could hardly slip a case knife between them; but they all have boating, bathing, and fishing, and all must be seen to be appreciated.
The ‘reconditioned’ automobiles are another source of rapture—to read about. They climb hills like the Rocky Mountain goat, burn up the road like the wild ass of the desert, have the acceleration and pick-up of a skyrocket, and bear you to far places on the wings of the wind, as one might aptly say. The verbal picture rivals Job’s description of the war horse, and you almost shed tears that circumstances compel ‘ole marster’ to sell this faithful slave ‘down ribber.’
So much for the positive advantages of our discovery. It has other merits. The ease with which the camp table is laid, the gain in tolerance and breadth of view, as well as in knowledge and spiritual uplift, that we get from our educational tablecloths, and the thoroughness with which, when the meal is over, the fireplace performs the usual functions of the washtub — all are arguments for our plan.