Point of View
Remembering can be the best reward
By Carl Heintze
I'm writing this on the shortest day of the year. The reason I know it is the shortest day of the year is because I remember last year and the year before. The winter solstice arrives at approximately the same time each December.
Remembering that is one of the things I learned somewhere, from my parents, from school, from my friends. Remembering is how we all learn and, in many ways, it's necessary to living.
We spend our growing years learning to remember--how to eat, how to read and write, how to get along with one another. Alas, we spend our declining years learning to forget.
Gradually our memories fade or they get rearranged from reality into something more nebulous. Now that we in the United States are living longer and longer lives, this becomes more and more apparent.
If we suffer from Alzheimer's disease, the scourge that all old folks fear, we reverse the process of our growing up. We forget almost everything, how to talk, how to eat, who we are.
But what if we never had memory upon which to depend. Some scientists believe this is the case with what are called lower animals. They don't remember much or, in some cases, anything. You can teach a dog tricks only by repeated rewards. And you're not really sure how much the dog really remembers.
You can't teach a cat much of anything, but then some people believe cats are really smarter than most people. They don't want humans to teach them what they already know.
Whatever the situation, the idea that we could survive without memory, sort of, is intriguing. We'd never know sorrow, because we would forget all sorrowful events, deaths, injuries, offensive behavior.
We'd also forgot all triumphs. Winning would be no more important than losing. Being hungry would be no different than being full. The prospects are considerable.
I thought this a unique idea until I heard of a book by Lois Lowery, The Giver, which won this year's Newberry Medal as the best young fiction of 2000.
Ms. Lowery, who has written 20 juvenile books, imagines a time when society as a whole had no memory. Nor did they have to do anything.
Everything was done for them, including remembering.
The society's collective memory was the responsibility of one person, an elder, elected for life by the council of elders in the tribe. The Giver's job was to remember everything so that when other members of the group wanted to know something, they went to the Giver and got advice from his vast store of knowledge.
Unfortunately, the Giver, like everyone else was mortal and he, at least remembered that he some day would have to die. Thus, he knew he had to train someone else to be his successor, to be the new giver.
So he found a youngster who was called the Receiver and slowly as the years passed he taught his successor what to remember.
In some ways it is like the Dalai Lama who is supposedly the reincarnation of a previous master Lama. The new Dalai Lama is selected by a group of elders, all monks, based on signs given by God. Once he is identified, his job of training to be the highest monk in Tibet begins.
This is not exactly the plot of The Giver. In fact, I won't tell you the plot of the book in the hope that you will go and read it yourself.
Ms. Lowry wrote the book, so she says, because she was intrigued by the fact that among teenagers peer pressure, the conformity to a single standard devised by teenagers is what is most important in life.
Maturity is the gradual shedding of this group standard for individuality. We learn as we grow into adulthood to be ourselves. We become individuals and our individuality, especially in the United States, is perhaps the most important part of living.
One also could say that as we grow older, we begin to lose this individuality. We are often seen not as ourselves but simply as part of a group, the old, with all that means--helplessness, loneliness, sickness, sorrow, the burden of memory.
On the other hand many older persons have wonderful and extensive memories. While getting many memories is not the same as getting wisdom, it is possible with cultivation to mine memory and to make from it a guide for those who come behind us.
Then we can become givers, too, the wise, the wonderful, the bearers of knowledge and experience. And we can revel not only in the present, which sometimes is sad and unpleasant, but also in the past, which is so wonderful.
|
Saratoga, California Since 1955
