The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall, summoned on this summer morning in 1922, can pick anything he pleases: diamonds scattered allover the parquet in 1888; a russet black-hatted beauty at a Parisian bar in 1901; a humid red rose among artificial ones in 1883; the pensive half-smile of a young English governess, in 1880, neatly reclosing her charge’s prepuce after the bedtime treat; a little girl, in 1884, licking the breakfast honey off the badly bitten nails of her spread fingers; the same, at thirty-three, confessing, rather late in the day, that she did not like flowers in vases; the awful pain striking him in the side while two children with a basket of mushrooms looked on in the merrily burning pine forest; and the startled quonk of a Belgian car, which he had overtaken and passed yesterday on a blind bend of the alpine highway. Such images tell us nothing about the texture of time into which they are woven — except, perhaps, in one matter which happens to be hard to settle. Does the coloration of a recollected object (or anything else about its visual effect) differ from date to date? Could I tell by its tint if it comes earlier or later, lower or higher, in the stratigraphy of my past? Is there any mental uranium whose dream-delta decay might be used to measure the age of a recollection? The main difficulty, I hasten to explain, consists in the experimenter not being able to use the same object at different times (say, the Dutch stove with its little blue sailing boats in the nursery of Ardis Manor in 1884 and 1888) because of the two or more impressions borrowing from one another and forming a compound image in the mind; but if different objects are to be chosen (say, the faces of two memorable coachmen: Ben Wright, 1884, and Trofim Fartukov, 1888), it is impossible, insofar as my own research goes, to avoid the intrusion not only of different characteristics but of different emotional circumstances, that do not allow the two objects to be considered essentially equal before, so to speak, their being exposed to the action of Time. I am not sure, that such objects cannot be discovered. In my professional work, in the laboratories of psychology, I have devised myself many a subtle test (one of which, the method of determining female virginity without physical examination, today bears my name). Therefore we can assume that the experiment can be performed — and how tantalizing, then, the discovery of certain exact levels of decreasing saturation or deepening brilliance — so exact that the ‘something’ which I vaguely perceive in the image of a remembered but unidentifiable person, and which assigns it ‘somehow’ to my early boyhood rather than to my adolescence, can be labeled if not with a name, at least with a definite date, e.g., January 1, 1908 (eureka, the ‘e.g.’ worked — he was my father’s former house tutor, who brought me Alice in the Camera Obscura for my eighth birthday).
Our perception of the Past is not marked by the link of succession to as strong a degree as is the perception of the Present and of the instants immediately preceding its point of reality. I usually shave every morning and am accustomed to change the blade in my safety razor after every second shave; now and then I happen to skip a day, have to scrape off the next a tremendous growth of loud bristle, whose obstinate presence my fingers check again and again between strokes, and in such cases I use a blade only once. Now, when I visualize a recent series of shaves, I ignore the element of succession: all I want to know is whether the blade left in my silver plough has done its work once or twice; if it was once, the order of the two bristle-growing days in my mind has no importance — in fact, I tend to hear and feel the second, grittier, morning first, and then to throw in the shaveless day, in consequence of which my beard grows in reverse, so to speak.
If now, with some poor scraps of teased-out knowledge relating to the colored contents of the Past, we shift our view and regard it simply as a coherent reconstruction of elapsed events, some of which are retained by the ordinary mind less clearly, if at all, than the others, we can indulge in an easier game with the light and shade of its avenues. Memory-images include after-images of sound, regurgitated, as it were, by the ear which recorded them a moment ago while the mind was engaged in avoiding hitting schoolchildren, so that actually we can replay the message of the church clock after we have left Turtsen and its hushed but still-echoing steeple behind. Reviewing those last steps of the immediate Past involves less physical time than was needed for the clock’s mechanism to exhaust its strokes, and it is this mysterious ‘less’ which is a special characteristic of the still-fresh Past into which the Present slipped during that instant inspection of shadow sounds. The ‘less’ indicates that the Past is in no need of clocks and the succession of its events is not clock time, but something more in keeping with the authentic rhythm of Time. We have suggested earlier that the dim intervals between the dark beats have the feel of the texture of Time. The same, more vaguely, applies to the impressions received from perceiving the gaps of unremembered or ‘neutral’ time between vivid events. I happen to remember in terms of color (grayish blue, purple, reddish gray) my three farewell lectures — public lectures — on Mr Bergson’s Time at a great university a few months ago. I recall less clearly, and indeed am able to suppress in my mind completely, the six-day intervals between blue and purple and between purple and gray. But I visualize with perfect clarity the circumstances attending the actual lectures. I was a little late for the first (dealing with the Past) and observed with a not-unpleasant thrill, as if arriving at my own funeral, the brilliantly lighted windows of Counterstone Hall and the small figure of a Japanese student who, being also late, overtook me at a wild scurry, and disappeared in the doorway long before I reached its semicircular steps. At the second lecture — the one on the Present — during the five seconds of silence and ‘inward attention’ which I requested from the audience in order to provide an illustration for the point I, or rather the speaking jewel in my waistcoat pocket, was about to make regarding the true perception of time, the behemoth snores of a white-bearded sleeper filled the house — which, of course, collapsed. At the third and last lecture, on the Future (‘Sham Time’), after working perfectly for a few minutes, my secretly recorded voice underwent an obscure mechanical disaster, and I preferred simulating a heart attack and being carried out into the night forever (insofar as lecturing was concerned) to trying to decipher and sort out the batch of crumpled notes in pale pencil which poor speakers are obsessed with in familiar dreams (attributed by Dr Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu to the dreamer’s having read in infancy his adulterous parents’ love letters). I give these ludicrous but salient details to show that the events to be selected for the test should be not only gaudy and graduated (three lectures in three weeks), but related
