Forgotten But Not Gone
As far as I know, there is no legal penalty for forgetting. That is why “I just can’t remember” is so frequently adduced during testimony in court. It is the perfect excuse. The beauty of it is that there is no reliable way of proving whether you remember or not.
“Lest We Forget” is a phrase often found on war memorials and other monuments. Its inspiration was Biblical, but those exact words can be traced back only as far as 1897, to a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling, called “Recessional,” in whose five stanzas they occur no less than six times.
Kipling’s message (written when Britain was celebrating Queen Victoria’s sixty years on the Throne, and when the British Empire, which Kipling’s own works had done much to glorify, was at its height) was nevertheless a somber one. It was a reminder that other great powers have perished – and in this semi–prophetic stanza he cites two of them from Antiquity:
Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
Of course, most people in 1897 – let alone today – have indeed forgotten Niniveh and Tyre. But it seems ironical that Kipling’s three-word mantra, only a few years later, became primarily associated, not with national humility, but with preserving the memory of those who died in battle, particularly in World War I.
In this connection, we have flowers which connote remembrance – notably Rosemary, as Hamlet’s Ophelia mentions in her ramblings – and of course the one actually called the “Forget Me Not” – although I have long thought that, particularly for placing on certain graves, there should also be a flower called the “Forget Me.”
Of course, God never forgets anything – which is to say (if you believe it) that, even when the person who remembered has passed away, the memory itself remains fixed forever in the fabric of Time. The past is still there.
What fascinates me is that so often we remember trivial things, while matters of more importance have completely slipped our mind. My mother, when in her late forties, remembered an incident at a party when she was a young child, and was offered some tea, which she refused. A little later she accepted some from the same person, who said (apparently rather chidingly), “You didn’t want any the first time.” How do I know that this happened? Because my mother told me about it some sixty years ago. How did I remember it until now? I didn’t. It seemed completely new to me when recently I re-read, for the first time, the diary I had kept in 1954, in which I had recorded it.
No wonder those people and devices which actually can help us to remember are so much in demand. Indeed, this has been the whole trend of technology over the last two centuries. From photography to sound recording, to computers, science is remembering for us in ways our ancestors hardly dreamed of.
(But, speaking of dreams, that is an area in which memory still fails us. If only we could clearly remember the dreams which inhabit one-third of our lives, in that strange state called sleep!)
Modern education, too, seems to be sadly lagging here, since so much of it is still based on trying to remember what you hear from teachers, and read in books – as demonstrated by your performance in examinations.
But forgetfulness can at times truly be a blessing. In January 2011, I was struck by a car in a pedestrian crossing near my home. My body was thrown 25 feet, and I was badly injured. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. But to this day, I have no memory of it – only of the events, involving police and medical personnel, that followed.
Of course, there is one profession whose main purpose is to ensure that we do not remember such unpleasant experiences – those who provide, where possible, the merciful oblivion we call anesthesia.
Indeed, with apologies to Robert Burns, and considering all the people whom, for one reason or another, one would be glad never to see again, perhaps sometimes “Old acquaintance” should indeed “be forgot, and never brought to mind.” For help in such cases, it would be good to have a personal anesthetist, whose motto (I suggest) would be: “LEST WE REMEMBER.”
