'Time, That Sedulous Artist'

The names of former classmates on the spread sheet fall into three categories: 1.) Those I remember clearly, often by appearance, an anecdote or some quality of character. 2.) Those I remember only as names, like half-forgotten fragments of lyric. 3.) Those forever null, less forgotten than never known in the first place. It was a big class.

Fifty years ago this June I graduated from high school. Even then I wasn’t particularly impressed with the accomplishment, though my father was a high-school dropout. Now some enterprising classmates have organized a reunion at a supper club in Cleveland on September 12, and I bought my ticket. Ninety others, classmates and spouses, have thus far done likewise. I’ve been warned that reunions can be difficult, even unpleasant. Tedium is a hazard. I have no taste for nostalgia, especially of the Boomer variety. I do, however, have memories that have had half a century to harden (or fade). Visiting the past can be like touring a museum in which some of the paintings have been mislabeled and others have been removed from public view. Aligning memory with reality is jarring. I find comfort in what Max Beerbohm writes in “Lytton Strachey” (Mainly on the Air, Heinemann, 1957):

“[There is] a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared — all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There's nothing to be done about it — nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”