On the night when he had half scared me out of my wits with that horrible demonstration with the electric torch on the edge of the bamboo table, he had been careful to explain that he was putting the question in its most elementary form. There were (he had said) other factors, and more important ones. One of these had already occurred to me. Stated as simply as possible, it was this:
As he had held the torch that night, with that notch that "had got to be thirty-three" in the middle of the illuminated edge, about six inches on either side of the notch had come within the lamp's beam. "Keep your eye on that edge and never mind the other dimensions," he had said, and he had proceeded to manipulate the lamp.
But how had he determined the distance at which the lamp must be held from the table's edge?
You see the enormous importance of this. The lighted portion of the edge was the extent of his memory, faculty or whatever one may call it. But what about that memory's quality as distinct from its extent? Suppose, instead of holding the torch a foot away, he had held it three inches away only? The nearer the shorter—but the brighter; the farther away the longer—but the dimmer. Our childish recollections are intense, but of small things; as we grow older we remember more, but more vaguely.... I find that I shall have to make use of the parallel columns again. Indeed I begin to suspect that I shall have to do so throughout. Was this then the position?
| BY APPROACHING THE LAMP | BY WITHDRAWING THE LAMP |
|---|---|
| He might re-live a given age again with great intensity. | The intensity would diminish but the scope of memory would enlarge. |
| Emotion or passion might become predominant characteristics, at the expense of intellectual comparisons. | He might become comparative, critical, philosophic, but at the cost of intensity of emotional experience. |
| He certainly would not succeed in any task that demanded width of outlook first of all. | He might be in danger of including so much that he would become diffuse and pointless. |
| He might concentrate so brilliantly as to perform a momentary and sensational feat—say to knockout Carpentier. | The speculative man might get the upper hand of the practical one and he would fail in a supreme momentary effort—in other words, Carpentier would knock him out. |
| A summer's day in the country might be almost unbearably beautiful to him. | It would be merely a matter of fresh air and exercise, to be set off against the working hours lost and the cost of two railway tickets. |
I am anxious not to go beyond my brief. I knew that for the purpose of his book he was attempting to manipulate himself, but what his success had so far been I did not know. Nevertheless all the possibilities had to be considered, and the more I thought of this one the more it impressed me. For practical purposes, these differences of memory-intensity might turn out to be the pivot on which all else turned.
For suppose that he had no choice but to go back and reopen the closed book of his life, and that nothing that Julia or I could do would stop him. Whether in that case was the better: to live as it were day by day and hour and hour, with joy and grief experienced at their highest pitch, or to continue to possess to the full this unique and double knowledge, of a past that had been a future and of a future that was once more a past?
To put it in another form, since he must do this Widdershins Walk, was it better for him to know he was doing it, or to do it knowing as little as possible about it?
Or, in its simplest form of all, would he be happier with or without a memory of any kind?