On Memories
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking…as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing…What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure…When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?”
(C. S. Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet)
This passage of Lewis’ sometimes sings to me when remembering a loved one and the journey we have shared, not always together, throughout the years, or when remembering a relaxing excursion to a beautiful part of creation. “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.” However, we shall get back to this thought, for this post is mainly about memories, but first I would like to take into account a little T.S. Eliot on a similar subject.
“Like a child who has wandered into a forest playing with an imaginary playmate and suddenly discovers he is only a child lost in a forest, wanting to go home.” This is how Celia, one of the characters of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, expresses her pursuit of a man whom she thought she knew and loved. In her mind she had a fantasy of what it would be to love him. The grandness and perfection of the relationship was all she could see. However, the one thing she failed to realize was that her thoughts, her memories, were only based on what she wanted to be true, not on what was true. Once truth was revealed, she saw the man in his true light and her fantasy came falling down; and the fall was great.
Another character in this play has a similar dilemma. Peter, who is incidentally taken with Celia, realizes he does not fully understand the truth about their relationship. Desiring to speak with her and learn what has happened, “in her terms,” he says, “Until I know that I shan’t know the truth about even the memory.” Like Celia, Peter had conjured up a memory based on a fantasy of his own. He much desired a love relationship with Celia; he interpreted her actions the way he wanted, instead of how she clearly meant them. Realizing what he had done he asks, “[W]hat is the reality of experience between two unreal people? If I can only hold to the memory I can bear any future. But I must find out the truth about the past, for the sake of the memory.”
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.” Throughout time, as our relationships and experiences come to full bloom, we indeed find great pleasure in the memories we carry with us. However, if we are not careful, we can be in danger of creating a memory based on a lie, a fantasy. Some may ask though, “What is the harm in this? If the final result is greater pleasure, so be it.” The harm is this, if we continue to base our memories on lies, what then is truth? Truth becomes what we want to believe, our pleasures, our desires, our lusts. And when reality comes in contact with the fantasy in which has been built on sand, the foundation will crumble, and, like Celia, the fall will be great. We need, with Peter, “find out the truth about the past, for the sake of the memory.” Our pleasures will not be pure and fully grown until our memories are striped from all traces of fantasy and placed on the solid rock of truth. As a man I find myself bending my memories in order to find greater pleasure. Lately I took a trip to Chattanooga, TN. My memory of the people and the place had been nothing but perfection. However, this is not a true representation of the people nor the place. I have to realize the people are not perfect; the place is not perfect. If I were to go back and visit, expecting the same experience, I should be doomed to fall. There is no guarantee the same experience will happen twice. That, I believe, is what makes the memory so pleasurable throughout time, the fact that each experience differs from another is what makes the memory blossom and the pleasure to grow.
