(2008)
MEMORY, MOURNFUL
Renan, in one of his books, recalls an old French legend of a buried city on the coast of Brittany. With its homes, public buildings, churches and thronged streets, it sank instantly into the sea. The legend says that the city’s life goes on as before down beneath the waves. The fishermen, when in calm weather they row over the place, sometimes think they can see the gleaming tips of the church-spires deep in the water, and fancy they can hear the chiming of the bells in the old belfries, and even the murmur of the city’s noises. There are men who in their later years seem to have an experience like this. Their life of youthful hopes, dreams, successes and joys has been sunk out of sight, submerged in misfortunes and adversities and has vanished altogether. All that remains is a memory. In their discouragement they seem to hear the echoes of the old songs of hope and gladness, and to catch visions of the old beauty and splendor, but that is all. They have nothing real left. They have grown hopeless and bitter.
(2009)
MEMORY RENEWED
Instances are on record in which those who had heard passages from a foreign and perfectly unintelligible tongue, which seemed, of course, to have passed at once from out their recollection, as the breath fades off from the polished mirror—have afterward recalled these in delirium or death, or at some moment of extraordinary excitement, with the utmost clearness and fullness of detail. And the instances are frequent, within our observation, in which aged men recall with vivid distinctness the poetry they recited, the problems they studied, the games they played, in the freshness of youth, or the arguments they made in the prime of their manhood; altho a thousand intervening events had taken a prominence before them since that, these never had seemed to have submerged those forever in their thoughts—Richard S. Storrs.
(2010)
MEMORY REVIVED BY SICKNESS
A case cited by Dr. Abercrombie confirms the suggestive theory that the stimulus which fever gives to the circulation (sign of the disease tho it is) may bring dormant mental impression into temporary activity. A boy at the age of four had undergone the operation of trepanning being at the time in a state of stupor from a severe fracture of the skull. After his recovery he retained no recollection either of the accident or of the operation. But at the age of fifteen, during an attack of fever, he gave his mother an account of the operation, describing the persons who were present, and even remembering details of their dress and other minute particulars.—Richard A. Proctor, New York Mail and Express.
(2011)