Unbegotten

“ Forgetfulness is what I wish for, yes. But there is no forgetfulness except in death—no Lethe save the Styx.”
“No forgetfulness except in death? You assume, then, that there is forgetfulness in death; a bold assumption. Have you no dread of something after death, the undiscovered country? Do you ignore the possibility of a future life? Suppose, beyond the grave, you preserve your identity—that is to say, your memory: in what respect will you have gained by the change?”
“I must take my risks. This much I know for certain: there is no forgetfulness in life. In death there may be. ”

“ We at once see the tremor of the ghosts of old history or tradition, the ghosts of reminiscences, in the thrill of whiteness in their petals, we might say, like something of an angel’s smile or like a rim of eternity; if there is an unmistakable beauty in the plum-blossom, it is in your own mind, Well, after all, where is beauty if not in your imagination? ”

“ And so the past becomes a mountain-cell,
Where lone, apart, old hermit-memories dwell
In consecrated calm, forgotten yet
Of the keen heart that hastens to forget
Old longings in fulfilling new desires. ”

“ And now I only remember my dead Joy in remembering my dead Sorrow. But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.
"THE PERFECT WORLD"
God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods, hear me:
Gentle Destiny that watchest over us, mad, wandering spirits, hear me:
I dwell in the midst of a perfect race, I the most imperfect. ”

“ Shall we never know more of them than Runic stones and mysterious mounds can unfold? These reminders of the things that once had an existence but have now vanished from the face of the earth, and well nigh from the memory of men—these things are full of suggestion, to say the least, and are quite apt to correct any undue vanity which may take possession of us, or any large idea of future fame. We may, perhaps, create a ripple in the surface of remembrance which marks the place where our human existence went out, and which, at the furthest, may last a few hundred years. ”

“ Stand with me on the heights of History, and looking far around on the wild arena of human destiny, can you transfer yourself to the vale of the past, the physically dead and buried, but spiritually immortal life, which forms the being and substance of all History? ”

“ The very word makes one think of mourning rings, and everlasting flowers, and urns, and mementoes of all sorts. Why are people so afraid of forgetting? There is nothing more beautiful than to forget, except, perhaps, to be forgotten. ”

“ Old memories throng upon the heart—memories of early, happy days, and of the loved and lost. The lost—ah, too soon did some die in their young beauty, whilst others dropped, like ripe fruit, into the tomb. ”

“ Dimly out of the past would appear the faces of men and women—long since dead and already only vaguely remembered—the companions of his youth, once individually vibrant with the current of life, now moldering alike in forgotten graves. ”

“ She had forgotten that night until lately—forgotten her tears, her doubts, her hesitation; but, as at the day of judgment the scroll of our lives will be unfolded before us, so even in this world there are times when part of the history is remembered by us, when the thoughts and the resolutions of the long ago, appear before us like unwelcome ghosts. ”

“ The curtain which through eternity has hidden the mystery of life and the mystery of death was pushed aside by a sacrilegious hand, and the mysteries ceased to be mysteries—yet they remained incomprehensible, like the Truth written in a foreign tongue. ”

“ It is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some memory, not our own, but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dusk move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. ”

“ Where there is memory which compelleth Time, the Muses' mother, and the Muses nine, there are all ages, past and future time,—unwearied memory that does not forget the actions of the past, that does not forego to stamp them freshly, that Old Mortality, industrious to retouch the monuments of time, in the world's cemetery throughout every clime. ”

“ Let black, then, rather stand for hideous memory: white for blessed blank oblivion, happiest gift of the gods! For who, indeed, can say that the record of his life is not crowded with failure and mistake, stained with its petty cruelties of youth, its meannesses and follies of later years, all which storm and clamour incessantly at the gates of memory, refusing to be shut out? Leave us alone, O gods, to remember our felicities, our successes: only aid us, ye who recall no gifts, aptly and discreetly to forget. ”

“ It is plain enough that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the very life and substance of society. They are the ones who ought to be first and always remembered. They are always forgotten by sentimentalists, philanthropists, reformers, enthusiasts, and every description of speculator in sociology, political economy, or political science. ”

“ Your unattained ambitions, your hopes, and your ideals will be swallowed in the grave. Your works will secure you a place in history, and many will remember your names until, in time, oblivion covers your memory as the grass conceals your tombs. Are you prepared for the time when your eyes become blind, and your trusted senses fail? ”

“ If He be lying dead in a forgotten grave, and hath not 'ascended up on high,' then there can come from His history and past nothing other in kind, though, perhaps, a little more in degree, than comes from the history and the past of the beautiful and white souls that have sometimes lived in the world. ”

“ They are like the history of the past sublimated by the eloquence of immutable truth, and are sanctified by a sleep that has eternal life within its closed lids. They have, too, a sympathy in retort with us. ”

“ There is no connected story of events, thoughts, acts, or feelings. We try in vain to re-collect; but the secrets of the grave are not more inviolable,—for the beginnings, like the endings, of life are lost in darkness. ”

“ Fresh be the wound, still-renewed be its smarting, So but thy image endure in its prime. But, if the steadfast commandment of Nature Wills that remembrance should always decay— If the loved form and the deep-cherished feature Must, when unseen, from the soul fade away— Me let no half-effaced memories cumber! ”

“ So the old stories, handed down by word of mouth through centuries, and always greedily heard, and willingly remembered, were gradually forgotten; and as the elder folk died out, were nearly all lost. A pity, for trivial and even childish as they would sound to us who live in a world of scientific wonders that those old people could never dream of, and no longer require to feed our imagination with the marvellous and supernatural, still all those ancient beliefs, legends and superstitions always seem to me like the romance of life crystallised, and, as such, a very precious thing. ”

“ Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom,
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain. ”

“ Our noblest dead, to judge from the most impassioned and inspired utterances of the men who have suffered for us, would bid us indeed remember these things,—remember them with all the intensity of which we are capable—but with few words. ”

“ The spirit of meditation and retrospection seems to hover over those solemn effigies resting in their eternal sleep, guarding in inimitable and awful silence secrets of the historic past that can never be solved. ”

“ If the dead live no more, what would memory be to us but a spectre and a sting? Should we not then seek to repress those tender recollections,—to close our eyes to those pale, sad visions of departed love? ”

“ Because we newly find ourselves as though surprised into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound, among obscure dusks and forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul! ”

“ From mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, they handed down on to one another fabulous and terrible stories, which became farther and farther removed from reality, which formed a more and more vague and, for that matter, a more and more frightful legend, but which kept alive in their imaginations the recollection of the God-Stone and, above all, its name. ”

“ How do you know, sir, that we have not met before, centuries ago? Do you not sometimes foresee a whole scene, just as it afterward takes place? Do you not sometimes look upon a strange face with a shudder? Does not a feature—a smile—or an expression of them combined—sometimes awake the slumbering memory of ages? Is it not so? have you never communed with the dead? ”

“ That withdrawing leaves thereunder
Vanishing, dim legends where it clomb.
Unforgotten, unremembered
Shall thy beauty haunt the brain
Like old magic cities embered
Where the golden sunsets wane;—
Ah, my love let be to-morrow! ”

“ And the "dead past's dead" unburied,
⁠By a magic word reveal.
Life has many hidden currents,
⁠Like the cave-streams of the earth,
Flowing deep and strong in secret,
⁠Ne'er betraying bourne or birth ”

“ And you read the inscriptions on the monuments, and all these people who have disappeared from the world rise up in your imagination. You see them young, laughing, loving; you see them hale, loquacious, insolently confident in the endlessness of life. ”

“ For no sooner are we gone hence than, even for such brief times as our memories may endure, we are apt to grow by processes of accumulative transformation into what we never were. Thou kind, kind fate, therefore—never enough named and celebrated—that biddest the sun of memory rise on our finished but imperfect lives, and then lengthenest or shortenest the little day of posthumous reminiscence, according as thou seest there is need of early twilight or of deeper shadows! ”

“ Their faces were pale and thoughtful, and a shadow had fallen on their spirits—the shadow that always fell when they were reminded of the Varians.
Memory was poison to their hearts.
“My heart hath but one passion
To forget.
Ah, is there nothing in the world then
To take away the soul’s divine regret?” ”

“ A forgotten reality may die and leave in its will seven thousand actualities and facts to be spent in its funeral and the building of a tomb.
In truth we talk only to ourselves, but sometimes we talk loud enough that others may hear us. ”

“ We have here expressed in plain language the imaginative memory of the beloved dead, rising upon the past, like moonlight upon midnight,—
"The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme."
This is its simple meaning—the statement of a truth, the utterance of personal feeling. But observe its hidden abstract significance—it is the revelation of what goes on in the depths of the soul, when the dead elements of what once was, are laid before the imagination, and so breathed upon as to be quickened into a new and higher life. ”

“ When thou dost wake again to life,
Wilt thou awake to weep?
If thou rememberest aught of past,
Thou mayst perhaps regret
The flowers, and trees, now dead and gone,
And for them mourn e’en yet.
A generation will have passed;
A new one thou wilt greet;
All will be strangers unto thee,
No friend of past thou’lt meet. ”

“ And weeping sisters laid her in her tomb,
Crowned with a wreath of perfumed hawthorn bloom.
And thus the Legend ended. It may be
Something is hidden in the mystery,
Besides the lesson of God’s pardon shown,
Never enough believed, or asked, or known.
Have we not all, amid life’s petty strife,
Some pure ideal of a noble life
That once seemed possible? ”

“ What have we here but hope and memory? What see we here but shadows? Shall we then fear to pass pure-handed where Fulfilment is and memory is lost in its own source, and shadows die in the light which cast them? ”

“ In the face of the great mystery it would be thought that those who have returned to life after having been, for an appreciable time, apparently dead might have gained some insight into the unknown that lies beyond. ”

“ Strictly contemporary experience is lit by an antique fiery light; life an "infernal saga . . . coming up-to-date." The racial memory, the animal memory, has been strangely extended; and memory is the identifiable soul. ”

“ In tracing back the associations of many gone-by years, a host of thoughts rush in, and pensive remembrance of the dead who have labored with us casts deep shadows into the vista through which we view the past. ”

“ Is the memory of the previous life or lives always obliterated by death and birth or by birth and death, which ever happens first? Do our odd sensations and impressions regarding people and places arise from an imperfect memory of something that we passed through in a previous life? We meet a stranger and at once like or dislike in an unreasoning manner: is that stranger one who has strongly influenced us for good or evil in some previous existence? ”

“ There has been the hope that by going back to our nurse’s or our mother’s knee we may find the secret of human destinies. But above and beyond this folk-lore appeals to all that which goes to make romance: the myth, the saga, the legend, combine with the mysterious lore of the unseen which lies at the root of what we term superstition. ”

“ What an interesting and varied picture do these dates present to my mind's eye, and how many remembrances are associated with them of joy and sorrow, of trial and happiness! I could willingly spend hours in recalling all in detail, and I feel as if it would do us both good, should I do so; for I find that, in the full occupation of the present, the lessons of the past are losing their power over me. Their voice cannot be heard in the busy bustle of life ”