Volume 4, Issue 2, page 5

Whio/teid c/ the
Chapter 2 -- MEMORIES A-GROWING
EMORY is not just yesterday, or last
year, or the days of man's youth.

It's all that happened in the now
just passed. It should be filled with
fflall that the self has experienced,
however seemingly trivial, because memory
is an endless ladder, every rung of which
is important. A memory not captured, a memory missed, is a rung missing or broken
from the ladder. Man needs every rung for
progress, as the builder needs every brick
of the wall in its proper place, every cobblestone of the street in the place where
it truly fits.

How far back does memory go, when man
seldom remembers anything before a certain
date in childhood, and only a few men claim
to remember the moment of birth? Memory of
the body, by the body, in which the five
senses do not seem to participate -- yet certainly must -- goes back to conception, to
the first cell produced by the joining of
sperm and ovum. And it may well, at the moment of conception, divide and go back
thru the mother, back thru the father.
How far back? It's probable that all of the
past can be found in each and every cell of
the human body. But can the body, thus recorded, deliver up its knowledge to its own
brain, its own memory?
It can, if the growing man continues as
much aware of himself and his surroundings
after the day he tells himself, " I am", as
he was before he knew himself an individual,
different from all others whose faces surround him, loom over him; whose voices
strike at him from so many directions. How
does man, seeking himself, go backward in
the search?. He finds himself in his environment, which changes little as man changes
much, or what seems much to man. Nostalgia,
the eternal urge to know what he does not
know, or feels that he dimly remembers,
prods man to recall himself, to realize
that "he came out from God " .

Watch the small child at the window on a
dark day when rain writes history on the
pane. It writes very ancient history, of
days and years and ages before there was
glass. What does the adult read in the face
of childhood as childhood watches the pictures thru the windowpane? The adult, being
"reasonable", doubts perhaps that the child
thinks anything, tho the adult may find
himself ever so little uneasy because,
watching the child struggle to understand,
he harks back to when he was that small,
that young, that eager to know. What does
the child think? The child doesn't tell,
because the child has no wards, or few
words -- none of which explain "rain", "thunder", "lightning", or even "windowpane".
Yet the rain has a sound that causes the
child to wonder:
"Have I heard this before, many times?"
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