TRICKS OF MEMORY

Hokitika Guardian, 8 November 1927, Page 2

TRICKS OF MEMORY

(By John Blunt in “Daily Mail.”)

The discussion as to which were the days gone by or the ones ill winch wo live, still goes merrily on, and 1 notice that in Sunday’s “Weekly Dispatch” Air Ralph Nevill has high words of praise for the pleasures of the Victorian ciu. But T wonder whether all this discussion really amounts to very much. AYlien elderly people speak enthusiastically about “the good old days,” one must remember that they are talking about a time when they themselves were young. The happiness, I venture to suggest, was in their youth much more than in the customs which were then current.

Even if nothing had changed and everything was in the same groove, it is obvious that a man who had pissed his prime could no longer find the pleasure that he once found. For he would inevitably have changed, and what once seemed exciting to him would now seem a here. AYlien such a one deprecates the nresent it is because lie is looking at it with an del mail’s eyes ; when he praises the past it is because lie is looking at it with an old man’s memory. ADVANCING YEARS.

Anil memory is a very deceptive tiling. It lias a trick of erasing all that one wants to forget, while throwing a roivjmtie glow over the episodes one wants to remember. Youth is the period of adventure and energy, and when wo think of our youth it is only natural that it should seem superior to all other times. I have not the let'st doubt that in years to come those people who art young to-day will shake their heads over the “degenerate changes” the) have witnessed.

What suits one generation does not suit the next—that is the long and the short of it. Why it should he so 1 can’t say, hut tlie fact remains that it. is so. Young people of to-day would not find happiness in what brought their parents happiness. They make their own pleasures, and it is usele-s to argue that they ought to make the same romance their elders iouml before them: later they will suffer the same regrets their elders non suffer.