A dear friend of mine told me that he dreams every night and, on awakening, grabs the note pad by his bed and writes down his dreams. In a way I envy him. He has an archive from his subconscious life. I wonder what he does with it? It must give him a second level of self-understanding.
Not having trained myself to recall even those sometime dreams I awake from, nor having the gift of retention, my dreams are almost instantly lost. I think of that each time I hear or sing the wonderful Isaac Watts hymn, "O God Our Help in Ages Past" and come to the lovely line, "...Time, like an ever-rolling stream, soon bears us all away; We fly, forgotten as a dream dies at the op'ning day."
While attempting recently to clean out and evaluate correspondence files, in order to separate the archive-worth wheat from the disposable chaff, I discovered a trove of professional and family faxes. Alas, most had faded beyond legibility. Sometimes there was an echo on the page which might be restored by my laser copy machine. But not knowing what I had lost, was it worth the effort? Was this ephemerality a gift to me, saving me the arduous tasks of attempted restoration, or should I rue the disappearance of whatever verbal treasures there might have been on those pages?
This prompted me to scan back over my more productive years and even into my retirement to consider all that is already beyond recall. I don't just mean my failing memory. I still operate on the theory voiced by my late wife, Elaine, who often would remind me and herself that some name or fact or experience wasn't really lost. It was still there in our own mental memory bank and just needed to be recalled. We often had fun teasing a particular memory out of our heads. She was partial to going through the alphabet and I realized, too, that often when one of us came to a particular letter -- or especially the beginning sound or sounds of some letter -- we could feel a little tingle of recognition. If we toyed with it, a frisson of recall would often burst forth and one of us would exclaim, "I've got it!" True, that technique now becomes less effective each year. Instead of that, I mean what is really beyond recall, what I have read or heard or experienced some time in the past that I no longer even realize is forgotten because I don't remember it.
Many memories, however, especially long-term ones, seem abundant enough with a just a little effort to access or find again with the help of some available prompt. Music and aromas are such prompts. Yet, as a writer, I find that I can rely less and less on my own memories or those of another person. The oral history interviews I have conducted confirmed for me the fallibility of memory as an accurate factual resource even though the oral story-telling has its own great value. To realize this one need only to hear various individuals, who were first-hand witnesses or participants in an event, tell you quite different versions of what happened -- when, who and why.
And that brings me back to the fading of those faxes (originally printed out on heat/light sensitized paper) and, unfortunately, also the deterioration of some old letters where the ink has faded or pencil markings now seem to be only weak shadows. When needed documents are available on microfilm or microfiche, our gratitude in finding legibility more than compensates for the awkwardness of accessing mini-pages.
Certainly I am not alone among those audio recording enthusiasts who have shelves or drawers or shoe boxes packed with old cassettes or even reel-to-reel tape. When the tapes have been carefully dated and marked (woe to those of us who don't label them!), later auditioning of them can be highly rewarding. But if we search in vain for the voice or quote or moment we want or need, that recall process can be vexing too. Ditto for videotape.
What is it that now makes me want to revisit the past anyway? I lived for years after World War II turning back hardly at all. It's different now. I'm in touch again, especially by email, with fellow veterans of my Navy flight squadron who lived the Pacific experience with me. I suppose it is creeping nostalgia that comes with age. Like that wonderful movie title of the early 1940s, "Hold Back the Dawn".
I am finding I have a new appreciation for historians. Theirs has always been a professional curiosity about past periods, modern or ancient. I had never seriously really interrupted my forward agenda to know what I had been missing.
These days, however, I am immersed in the past, digesting and assessing and selecting gems from the treasure of correspondence left behind when my beloved life partner died almost two years ago. Reading from and processing her recorded personality, mostly hand-written but also some typed, is painful and pleasurable at the same time. I am so deeply thankful that these memorabilia have been preserved.
I have just finished reading a remarkable lecture given by a friend of mine, a retired psychology professor, in which she exhorts students to learn "to discover and lead by your strengths." Identifying our strengths is not easy, she said, but added, "I think it is possible. For a given person, a strength is a life-enhancing and socially responsible aptitude, attitude, or behavior with which one feels basically at home, and unselfconscious."
From that challenge I tried to remember by examining myself and concluding that, all my life since childhood, my passion has been to share -- to share ideas, feelings, experiences, perhaps my talents. Why else did I improvise stage playlets with my playmates in old barns and chicken coops so long ago and why did I pretend to broadcast recorded music and chatter up through the heat register to my elders from our basement? Why else in grade school did I create a crudely typed and illustrated a little Lee Journal for my family? Since then, in grown-up broadcasting, films, journalism and eclectic writing I have discovered the joy of sharing. And I would like to think that this wanting to share is my strength, a life-enhancing and socially responsible aptitude, attitude, or behavior....
And so what, if faxes have faded and dreams have died and letters are lost? I will continue to share what I can, what I have. If only I can remember it!
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| Page last modified by Richard Lee on 31 August 2002 |
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