“The unexamined life is not worth living.” --- Socrates
Once upon a time, in my younger days, I was a guest at what passed for a country club in the Texas outback. I was introduced to these two old boys – and I do mean old, who were camped out at the bar and spinning yarns about the good old days. They got into a serious discussion about a particular football game that took place while they were in high school. Now these two gentlemen had to be at least in their late seventies, if not older. That means the football game was played a minimum of sixty years in the past. To listen to them talk and recount in detail the particulars of this contest you would have thought the game was played yesterday.
My wife’s Grandfather was a veteran of World War I. He fought in the battles of Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele and had many unpleasant encounters with the opposition. Most of these events took place before he was twenty years old. We always assumed his memories of this time were so clear and precise because of the traumatic nature of the things he saw and did and lived through.
It turns out that there is a reasonable explanation that covers both examples of exceptional memory stated above. This theory also explains why so many of us have such vivid memories of our time in high school. According to Wray Herbert, who is an award winning writer specializing in matters of the mind, humans in general have more and stronger memories of late adolescence and early adulthood than any other time in their lives. There are biological and cognitive reasons for this but the end result is we have better memory storage and maintenance during this stage than any other phase of our existence. He calls this phenomenon a “Reminiscence Bump” and it goes a long way to explaining why so many of us can remember high school so clearly.
Dr. Clay Routledge takes things one step further by saying this reservoir of memories that society calls “nostalgia” is a natural, healthy human tendency. It provides us with a positive view of the past that helps to give a greater sense of continuity and meaning to our lives. According to Dr. Routledge nostalgia is most common in adults over fifty who are in the process of re-evaluating their lives and it is all part of being a mentally healthy person.
I wasn’t aware of any of this information until quite recently. After graduating from P.C.S.S. I made a conscious effort to put aside most of my high school memories. I did not want to become one of those vaguely pathetic stock figures who continues to live in the past and never really does much when their high school days are over. I didn’t want the rest of my life to be an epilogue. So in keeping with this sentiment I made a concerted effort to repress most memories of high school. But what is banished from the conscious remains in the sub-conscious and never really disappears. Some fifteen to twenty years after leaving Port Credit I began having dreams, while I slept, about my time in high school. I realise now these were my long repressed memories bubbling to the top again. These dreams were wonderful! I can’t remember much actual content but for the rest of my life I will never forget how they made me feel. Sleeping or awake I have never experienced such strong feelings of happiness, contentment and yearning. They made me sorry to wake up.
So what exactly was Socrates referring to in his “unexamined life” statement? I am now inclined to believe in his own pithy, concise way he was trying to get at what Dr. Routledge explained in more detail. After all, philosophers were the self-help gurus of their day. If Socrates were alive today and he had been a student at P.C.S.S. I am sure he would show up at every Alumni Night and talk as long as someone was there to listen. He might even convince the organizing committee to make Alumni Night a toga party some year.
P.S. No hemlock jokes please.
|