The Crown of Individuality: X. Forgetting as a Fine Art

The Crown of Individuality. BY WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN. X. Forgetting as a Fine Art. Forgetting is one of the fine arts of living at our best. It is not that phase of non-remembering, where a name or a date or a fact has not strength enough to keep itself from sinking deep into memory's sea of oblivion. Fine forgetting means character asserting itself — not mind losing itself. It is the blue pencil of wisdom — cutting out unnecessary words from the text of our living. It is individual kingship determining what thoughts it will permit to reside in its kingdom. It is the exclusion act of the soul — eject- ing the unworthy and the undesirable. A great editor once said: "The true secret of editing is to know what to put int^ the waste- basket." Forgetting is the soul's place for losing discarded thoughts, depressing memories, mean ambitions, false standards and low ideals. All the virtues, vices and qualities of mental and moral life may be defined in terms of — forgetting or of remembering. Self- ishness is forgetting others in over-remembering self. Worry is the inability to forget the troubles that may never happen. Honor is remembered high standards made evident in acts. Anger is the explosion of an over-heated memory. Forgiveness is the heart's for£3tfulness of an injury. Ingratitude is the heart's forgetfulness of a favor. Habit is the memory of acts, making repetition easier. Mercy is the memory of human weakness tempering justice. Envy is forgetting one's own possessions in over-remembering those of

• From The Crown of Individuality. Copyright, 1909, by Fleming H. Re veil Company.

THE CROWN OF INDIVIDUALITY. 993 others. Influence is the remembered acts of one inspiring the acts of others. Patience is forgetting petty troubles along the way in concentrating thought on the goal. Love is the heart's sweet- est memories shrined in another. Forgetting as a fine art has two distinct phases: learning how to forget and what to forget. Forgetting is the heart's eclipse of a memory. It is so easy to say lightly to some one suffering from a memory, "Oh, just forget it all." Those of us who have sought honestly and bravely to fight it out on Ihe silent battlefield of the soul know that forgetting is never easy. If it were there would be neither credit, courage nor strength in mastering it. Those peo- ple who tell you moral battles are easy, really know nothing about it, care nothing, or they are getting ready to tell you they have just remembered an appointment and must say "good-bye." It is a real fight, but we can win in the end — if we are not afraid of a quick, hard fight. It is better than a long siege of remembering that lasts for years. Keeping the world from knowing our pain or struggle by veil- ing our sorrow with a smile, seeming to forget, is fairly easy; but this is not — real forgetting. The biggest souls find it hardest to forget. Trained forgetting is paradoxic. We cannot forget by trying intensely to forget — this merely deepens and gives new vitality to the memory. True forgetting really means finer mem- ory; it is displacing one memory by another, by a stronger one, an antidotal one. It means concentrating on the second phase so that the first is weakened, neutralized, and faded out like a well- treated ink-stain. It is removing a weed from the garden of thought, and then planting a live, sturdy flower in its stead. It is cultivating new interests, new relations, new activities. Time helps wonderfully, but especially when we go into partnership with her. If we learn to forget wisely and unselfishly in the trifles of our daily living with others, we shall silently accumulate higher pressure reserve power for our own later needs. Let us forget thorns of daily living in remembering roses of its possibility; forget things that pain in remembering unnoted reasons for thankfulness; forget the weakness of those around us in seeking to discover wherein they are strong. Let us forget the disappointments in

994 IMPROVEMENT ERA. the courage of new determination; forget the little wrong we have suffered from our friend, in living again in the memory of his many kindnesses; forget the things that depress in concentrating on those that exalt. Fine forgetting is an attempt at — finer justice. It means aggressive living — on the uplands of truth and light. The man who lets the really great things of life, love, honor, duty, trust, friendship, loyalty, justice, selfishly slip away from him for the mere gratification of a moment or a mood, has no right at first to forget. His* first duty is to see that he has not been keeping his conscience under the ether of self-apology. He must realize the wrong, and do all in his power to right it. Then in his new strength the petty things will lose their treacherous charm. They will fade into the dim recesses of forgetfulness where they belong, luminant, inspiring. There are moments when a man rejoices that he is living, that he is yet able to do the right thing he disdained — to fill some one's life with roses, clear someone's path of sorrow. He has the new opportunity of doing a big man's work in a great, simple, self- forgetful way. He who listens gleefully to scandal, turns it over meltingly on the tongue of appreciation, and then syndicates it with supple- mentary chapters of his own guessing, repeats it until it becomes a stained tattoo in memory. His ears should be debarred from listening and his mind taught to forget by thinking deeply of the pain such scandal would give to him, were he or some one dear to him the victim, innocent or guilty. He whose success has made him hard, selfish, intolerant, and critical, who has no patience with those who have not succeeded, should* rest for a little from his work of pinning new medals on the chest of self -approval. He should forget his unworthy vanity by recalling his own hard struggles and the part that chance, pat- ronage, favor, or even questionable cleverness, has had in incubat- ing his prosperity. He may then gladly extend the helping hand he now withholds. We often let an act of the long ago poison our present living: we remember when we should forget. Tl^ere are things done in the inexperience of youth, in moments of unreason, acts of many years ago, that have left livid scars in thought, that sting and

THE CROWN OF INDIVIDUALITY. 995 canker, that discourage and deaden purpose, depress our moral vitality, dim our mental vision, and dull our energy. We should let the dead past bury its dead. We should put them forever out of life and thinking. If we have made all reparation possible, let us consider them as the acts of someone else — a weaker self that is now dead, not the self that lives today, the one we are seeking to make finer and better. Let us make our new self more than a monument to a dead past. Let it be to us a prophetic tablet to the greater self we are preparing. Remember and think of past folly, mistakes, sin and sorrow only long enough to repair, to atone and to avoid. Then forget the yesterdays of sadness, shame, wrong and failure in the soul's concentration on the new, fresh, clean days for higher, truer liv- ing, making each new day but the prelude to a new, better tomorrow,. It was this fine forgetting St. Paul meant when he said "Forgetting the things which are behind I press forward to the mark of my high calling." Forgetting of this type is simply — for- giving ourselves for past errors. We forgive others for wrongs where there is true regret, realization, and the promise, direct or implied, of non repetition. If we are honest in our determination, if we really have acquired new wisdom, why should we not thus forgive — ourselves? Forgetting is the hardest lesson of life, and it is never so hard as with the memories of the emotions. Our bitterest moments of living are when we drape our sweetest memories in black because they belong to a past that is dead forever. There are high-lights of remembered joy that overcome us with madden- ing pain, harder to bear than any actual sorrow, past or present. There are memory cells that we long to identify, to individualize and to isolate from the millions of their fellows in the brain and to kill as the electric needle deadens the life of an individual hair- cell. "Sorrow's crown of sorrows," says Tennyson, "is remember- ing happier things." Lang, hard sorrow is a sickness of the soul, from which in time we may gradually emerge. Nature gently leads us back to health in our days of emotional convalescence by helping us to forget and by giving us new memories to remember.

996 IMPROVEMENT ERA. Memory is a mental force we cannot kill, but we can direct, we can give it new subjects to act upon, new right engines of purpose to move, new channels into which to run. There are sometimes petty fractures of our pride, irritating incidents that hurt perhaps because we are nervous. They loom large before us. For the time each seems as big as a real sorrow or loss. If we cannot master, it may be as well to surrender to it just for a little, to think it out, to talk it out, to get it out as much as possible from the emotional system. Then we should cease to think and to talk; we should learn to forget, avoiding situations and conditions that revive the pain, seeking right work and association that lead from it. Then even a great cankering sorrow will be conquered. If found unworthy we shall find it si- lenced forever in our hearts and— dead in our memory. L2t us seek to begin each new day in the consciousness of our crown of individuality as serene and calm as though it were a new life, with nothing of the old remaining but its wisdom, its sweet memories, its duties, its responsibilities, and the hope, joys, privi- leges, love, and possessions the old life has bequeathed to us. (The next article of this series, "The Victoria Cross of Happiness," will appear in the October number of the Era.) The Freedom of Obedience and Service. (For the Improvement Era.) Proyo, Utah. Oh, may I know the Lord as friend, And love of him my life attend; May freedom's joy my soul e'er thrill, In yielding mine to Father's will. Oh, may I grow to love to give, And for the help of others live; May sweetest joy be mine to know That I have lessened others' woe. May life eternal be my share, Under my Redeemer's care, With those I love — eternal joy, Eternal work in God's employ. George H. Brimhall