'Now Is for Living, Not Remembering'

Often the mark of a good essay is the seeming innocuousness of its inspiration. Big, topical ideas tend to wither this reader’s interest. In the right hands, unlikely premises blossom: Hazlitt on juggling. Lamb on roast pig. Stevenson on umbrellas. Chesterton on chalk and cheese. Liebling on boxing. In the April edition of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple contemplates benches and those they memorialize in “Strolling through the Turning World”: 

“Along the pathways in the garden are wooden benches for the public to sit or take their rest upon, and practically all of them are inscribed with the carved names of people whom relatives or friends have wanted to memorialise thus. Now this seems to me a civilised custom, in part because it is modest rather than flamboyant. It is a little gift to the town, a manifestation of a belief in continuity, as well as a memorial.”

 

Remembering the dead – even the anonymous dead we never knew – is a human obligation. With death, a world comes to an end. Someone like us was once at the center of that world, with all their flaws and gifts. Almost eight years ago, a Canadian graduate student in statistics at my university died of cancer at the impossible age of twenty-six. I never knew Sarah Tooth, though we worked in the same building. I met her parents and wrote several stories about her.

 

In 2015, a memorial bench for Sarah was placed in the engineering quadrangle. Nearby, a bur oak was planted. The brass plaque on the bench gives the dates of her birth and death, and these lines, spoken by Bolingbroke to Hotspur (Henry Percy) in Act II, Scene 3 of Richard II:

 

“I count myself in nothing else so happy

As in a soul remembering my good friends.”

 

Silently, we add Bolingbroke’s subsequent lines:

 

“And, as my fortune ripens with thy love,

It shall be still thy true love’s recompense:

My heart this covenant makes, my hand thus seals it.”

 

A bench is a place of rest and meditation. A student, though young, might sit here in the warmth of a Texas spring, contemplate the thriving oak, watch the squirrels, perhaps read the plaque and wonder who Sarah Tooth was. Dalrymple is a reader of such memorials:

 

“Looking at this bench dedicated to the memory of this man ‘remembered with pride,’ I could not but regret that I had taken so little interest in the memories of my elders, who actually witnessed or participated in so many momentous events. I was too egotistically concerned with my own small life, too unaware, except intellectually, that I would one day be old myself and therefore vastly more interested in the past than in the future, to take an interest in the memories of the old, which in any case I thought would always be available to me should I ever want them: for when you are young, time moves slowly if at all. There will thus be time enough for memories later; now is for living, not remembering.”