There are beauties which the present fails to appreciate. That is
natural, because it is greedy, disordered, care-ridden. Memory exists
to see that justice is done. To it falls the divine rôle of restoring
and, at times, pardoning. (It is memory which, in the last resort,
vindicates and judges. It is in its light that things appear to us
under the aspect of eternity.)
None of our thoughts would be really happy that had not received the
approbation of memory, that did not find themselves sealed at last
with its sovereign imprint. We do not know the true value of our
moments until they have undergone the test of memory. Like the images
the photographer plunges into a golden bath, our sentiments take on
color; and only then, after that recoil and that transfiguration, do
we understand their real meaning and enjoy them in all their tranquil
splendor.
Days of ours that had seemed to us dull and hopeless show themselves in
memory luminous and decisive. Journeys undertaken without eagerness,
without enthusiasm, and without any of the freshness of surprise,
become, from a distance, fruitful in revelations and discoveries.
Every reality develops with time a thousand aspects of itself that
are just as real, as charged with meaning and consequence, as the
original aspect. We cannot foretell what memory will contrive for
us. It is a treasure all the more precious and unexpected because it
is so independent of our rudimentary logic. For the logic of memory
is more subtle than ours; it seems entirely free from our miserable
calculations; it draws its inspirations from our true interests, which
we ourselves are forever misapprehending. The slow task it pursues
testifies to so rare a virtue and so munificent a wisdom that man,
struck with his own unworthiness, might well seek there the signs of a
divine intervention.
Sometimes it is a friend, whom we have misunderstood or misjudged, who
takes on in memory his true aspect and his true stature and reveals the
profound influence which, without our knowing it, he has exercised over
our thoughts.
Sometimes it is a word which we heard at first with an inattentive or
distrustful ear, and which we find again engraved in letters of gold
over the portico of the secret temple where we love to collect our
thoughts.
Like some skilful goldsmith, memory seizes the materials that our life
accumulates haphazard. It submits them to the touchstone, fashions
them, embellishes them and imprints upon them that mysterious sheen
which gives them their distinctive meaning and their value.
V
The cult of memory should not turn us away from the present out of
which memory itself draws its nourishment.
We sometimes meet men of whom plain people say, with profound wisdom,
“Their mind is elsewhere.” It is true; they are the timid and tormented
souls who have early sought in memory a refuge which nothing, it seems,
could ever make them renounce.
Let us beware of troubling this retreat. Some day, perhaps, we may long
for one like it. But however deeply one may seem to have taken refuge
in memory, one cannot escape the clutch, the invasion of the present.
It is best, therefore, and with all the strength that is in us, to
accept, honor, love this present as the principal source of our riches.
If the true cult of memory were a less exceptional moral usage, many
men would hesitate to create bad memories for themselves; for our worst
memories are not those of our sufferings, our ordeals, our privations,
but of our shameful acts, our cowardices and our betrayals.
Our weakness lasted only a moment; must we really, for thirty years,
feel the hostile stare of that moment resting heavily upon us? Who
knows? Hope, even so, in the clemency of memory, which is able to
mitigate and pardon everything. It is indulgent and full of pity. In a
world given over to spite and reprisals, it remains the only inviolable
refuge of the outcast, as the cathedrals used to be in the days of the
right of sanctuary.
For him who descends with true fervor into his own depths, memory
always preserves some corner pure from all baseness. Do we not know,
moreover, that in order to console us memory consents to work in
concert even with its enemy, forgetfulness?