Forgetting (Prose)

Unit 3 – Prose

Forgetting

Robert Lynd

Warm Up

A. How sharp is your memory?
Take this five-minute memory test.
The teacher will read out a series of 30 words, one by one. Some of them will be repeated. Whenever you hear a word for the first time, write ‘N’ (for New) in the corresponding box and when you hear a repeated word write ‘R’. After completing this task, check your results. Compare it with your friends and see where you stand.

1 N	11	21
2	12	22
3	13	23
4	14	24
5	15	25
6	16	26
7	17	27
8	18	28
9	19	29
10	20	30

B. Have you ever lost or misplaced anything of value due to forgetfulness?
At times, instances of forgetfulness may land us in a tight spot or in a difficult situation. Therefore, we need to find ways to remember what we have to do or carry with us. One such way is to make a mental check-list that we can verify before starting any activity.
e.g. setting an alarm

C. Discuss and share your views with the class on the following.
Is forgetfulness a result of carelessness or preoccupation?

Essay: Forgetting

Robert Lynd

A list of articles lost by railway travellers and now on sale at a great London station has been published, and many people who read it have been astonished at the absent-mindedness of their fellows. If statistical records were available on the subject, however, I doubt whether it would be found that absent-mindedness is common. It is the efficiency rather than the inefficiency of human memory that compels my wonder.

Modern man remembers even telephone numbers. He remembers the addresses of his friends. He remembers the dates of good vintages. He remembers appointments for lunch and dinner. His memory is crowded with the names of actors and actresses and cricketers and footballers and murderers. He can tell you what the weather was like in a long-past August and the name of the provincial hotel at which he had a vile meal during the summer. In his ordinary life, again, he remembers almost everything that he is expected to remember. How many men in all London forget a single item of their clothing when dressing in the morning? Not one in a hundred. Perhaps not one in ten thousand. How many of them forget to shut the front door when leaving the house? Scarcely more. And so it goes on through the day, almost everybody remembering to do the right things at the right moment till it is time to go to bed, and then the ordinary man seldom forgets to turn off the lights before going upstairs.

There are, it must be admitted, some matters in regard to which the memory works with less than its usual perfection. It is only a very methodical man, I imagine, who can always remember to take the medicine his doctor has prescribed for him. This is the more surprising because medicine should be one of the easiest things to remember. As a rule, it is supposed to be taken before, during, or after meals and the meal itself should be a reminder of it. The fact remains, however, that few but the moral giants remember to take their medicine regularly. Certain psychologists tell us that we forget things because we wish to forget them, and it may be that it is because of their antipathy to pills and potions that many people fail to remember them at the appointed hours. This does not explain, however, how it is that a life-long devotee of medicines like myself is as forgetful of them as those who take them most unwillingly. The very prospect of a new and widely advertised cure-all delights me. Yet, even if I have the stuff in my pockets, I forget about it as soon as the hour approaches at which I ought to swallow it. Chemists make their fortunes out of the medicines people forget to take.

The commonest form of forgetfulness, I suppose, occurs in the matter of posting letters. So common is it that I am always reluctant to trust a departing visitor to post an important letter. So little do I rely on his memory that I put him on his oath before handing the letter to him. As for myself, anyone who asks me to post a letter is a poor judge of character. Even if I carry the letter in my hand I am always past the first pillar-box before I remember that I ought to have posted it. Weary of holding it in my hand, I then put it for safety into one of my pockets and forget all about it. After that, it has an unadventurous life till a long chain of circumstances leads to a number of embarrassing questions being asked, and I am compelled to produce the evidence of my guilt from my pocket. This, it might be thought, must be due to a lack of interest in other people’s letters; but that cannot be the explanation, for I forget to post some even of the few letters that I myself remember to write.

As for leaving articles in trains and in taxies, I am no great delinquent in such matters. I can remember almost anything except books and walking-sticks and I can often remember even books. Walking-sticks I find it quite impossible to keep. I have an old-fashioned taste for them, and I buy them frequently but no sooner do I pay a visit to a friend’s house or go a journey in a train, than another stick is on its way into the world of the lost. I dare not carry an umbrella for fear of losing it. To go through life without ever having lost an umbrella—has even the grimmest-jawed umbrella-carrier ever achieved this?

Few of us, however, have lost much property on our travels through forgetfulness. The ordinary man arrives at his destination with all his bags and trunks safe. The list of articles lost in trains during the year suggests that it is the young rather than the adult who forget things, and that sportsmen have worse memories than their ordinary serious-minded fellows. A considerable number of footballs and cricket-bats, for instance, were forgotten. This is easy to understand, for boys, returning from the games, have their imaginations still filled with a vision of the playing-field, and their heads are among the stars—or their hearts in their boots—as they recall their exploits or their errors. They are abstracted from the world outside them. Memories prevent them from remembering to do such small prosaic things as take the ball or the bat with them when they leave the train.

For the rest of the day, they are citizens of dreamland. The same may be said, no doubt, of anglers who forget their fishing-rods. Anglers are generally said—I do not know with what justification—to be the most imaginative of men, and the man who is inventing magnificent lies on the journey home after a day’s fishing is bound to be a little absent-minded in his behaviour. The fishing-rod of reality is forgotten by him as he day-dreams over the fears of the fishing-rod of Utopia. His loss of memory is really a tribute to the intensity of his enjoyment in thinking about his day’s sport. He may forget his fishing-rod, as the poet may forget to post a letter, because his mind is filled with matter more glorious.

Absent-mindedness of this kind seems to me all but a virtue. The absent-minded man is often a man who is making the best of life and therefore has no time to remember the mediocre. Who would have trusted Socrates or Coleridge to post a letter? They had souls above such things.

The question whether the possession of a good memory is altogether desirable has often been discussed, and men with fallible memories have sometimes tried to make out a case for their superiority. A man, they say, who is a perfect remembering machine is seldom a man of the first intelligence, and they quote various cases of children or men who had marvellous memories and who yet had no intellect to speak of. I imagine, however, that on the whole the great writers and the great composers of music have been men with exceptional powers of memory. The poets I have known have had better memories than the stockbrokers I have known. Memory, indeed, is half the substance of their art.

On the other hand, statesmen seem to have extraordinarily bad memories. Let two statesmen attempt to recall the same event—what happened, for example, at some Cabinet meeting—and each of them will tell you that the other’s story is so inaccurate that either he has a memory like a sieve or is an audacious perverter of the truth. The frequency with which the facts in the autobiographies and speeches of statesmen are challenged, suggests that the world has not yet begun to produce ideal statesmen—men who, like great poets, have the genius of memory and of intellect combined.

At the same time, ordinarily good memory is so common that we regard a man who does not possess it as eccentric. I have heard of a father who, having offered to take the baby out in a perambulator, was tempted by the sunny morning to pause on his journey and slip into a public-house for a glass of beer. Leaving the perambulator outside, he disappeared through the door of the saloon bar. A little later, his wife had to do some shopping which took her past the public-house, where to her horror, she discovered her sleeping baby. Indignant at her husband’s behaviour, she decided to teach him a lesson. She wheeled away the perambulator, picturing to herself his terror when he would come out and find the baby gone. She arrived home, anticipating with angry relish the white face and quivering lips that would soon appear with the news that the baby had been stolen. What was her vexation, however, when just before lunch her husband came in smiling cheerfully and asking: “Well, my dear, what’s for lunch today?” having forgotten all about the baby and the fact that he had taken it out with him. How many men below the rank of a philosopher would be capable of such absent-mindedness as this? Most of us, I fear, are born with prosaically efficient memories. If it were not so, the institution of the family could not survive in any great modern city.

About the Author

Robert Wilson Lynd (1879 – 1949), an Irish writer, is one of the greatest essayists of the 20th Century. He began his career as a journalist. He penned numerous articles for the leading newspapers and magazines like Daily News, The New Statesman and Nation. He wrote under the pseudonym ‘Y.Y.’ His essays cover a wide range of simple and interesting topics. They are humorous, delightful, ironical and satirical. Robert Lynd was awarded with an honorary literary Doctorate by Queen’s University, Belfast in 1947. He was also honoured by the Royal Society of Literature with a silver medal and by The Sunday Times with a gold medal for Belles Lettres. In his essay ‘Forgetting’, Robert Lynd takes a humorous look at the nature and effects of forgetfulness.

Glossary

• eccentric – tending to act strangely
• indignant – being very angry
• vintage – wine of high quality produced in a particular year
• antipathy – strong dislike
• fortunes – huge sums of money
• reluctant – unwilling
• delinquent – a young person who is regularly involved in wrongdoing
• exploits – daring or heroic acts or actions, feats
• abstracted – lacking concentration on what is happening around
• prosaic – dull
• mediocre – not very good, ordinary
• fallible – capable of making mistakes
• sieve – strainer or filter
• audacious – bold and daring
• quivering – trembling, shivering
• vexation – irritation, annoyance

Comprehension Questions

1. Based on your understanding of the essay, answer the following questions in one or two sentences each.

a) What does Lynd actually wonder at?
b) Name a few things that a person remembers easily.
c) How do psychologists interpret forgetfulness?
d) What is the commonest type of forgetfulness, according to Lynd?
e) What does the author mean when he says the letter in his pocket leads an unadventurous life?
f) What are the articles the writer forgets most often?
g) Who are the citizens of ‘dreamland’? Why?
h) What is common about the ‘angler’ and the ‘poet’?

2. Based on your reading, answer the following questions in two to four sentences each.

a) What made people wonder about the absentmindedness of their fellow-beings?
b) What are our memories filled with?
c) When does human memory work with less than its usual capacity?
d) Why, according to Lynd, should taking medicines be one of the easiest actions to remember?
e) How do the chemists make fortunes out of the medicines people forget to take?
f) The list of articles lost in trains suggest that sportsmen have worse memories than their ordinary serious-minded fellows. Why does Lynd say this?
g) What kind of absent-mindedness is regarded as a virtue by Lynd?
h) Narrate the plight of the baby on its day out.

3. Answer the following in a paragraph of about 100–150 words each.

a) You have borrowed a branded cricket bat from your reluctant friend for an outstation match. After returning home you realize you have absent-mindedly left it in the hotel room. Write a letter of apology and regret to your friend.
b) Kahlil Gibran states ‘Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.’ Write an article for your school magazine, linking your ideas logically and giving appropriate examples.
c) Will you sympathise or ridicule someone who is intensely forgetful? Write an essay justifying your point of view.

Vocabulary

A. Homonyms and Heteronyms

Homonyms are two or more words that have same pronunciation but different meanings.
They are of two types:

1. Homographs – same spelling and same sound but different meanings.
   e.g. park – a piece of public land / park – to leave a vehicle in a particular place
   bat – a sport equipment for hitting the ball / bat – a mammal

2. Homophones – same sound but different spellings and meanings.
   e.g. dear – a loved one / deer – a wild animal

Heteronyms – same spelling but different sounds and meanings.
e.g. lead – a metal / lead – guide
minute – a period of time / minute – very small

B. Clipped Words

Clipped words are words formed by dropping one or more syllables from longer words without changing the meaning.

Unclipped	Clipped
chimpanzee	chimp
photograph	photo
microphone	mike
cafeteria	cafe
gasoline	gas
helicopter	chopper
telephone	phone
university	varsity
memorandum	memo
influenza	flu
hippopotamus	hippo
bridegroom	groom
fanatic	fan
demonstration	demo
perambulator	pram
refrigerator	fridge

C. Professions and Definitions

Match the professions with their relevant job descriptions:

A	B
1. pathologist	studies diseases
2. ornithologist	studies birds
3. entomologist	studies insects
4. archaeologist	studies artefacts and physical remains
5. sociologist	studies functioning of human society
6. geologist	studies the matter that constitutes the earth
7. linguist	studies languages and their structure
8. seismologist	studies earthquakes
9. herpetologist	studies reptiles and amphibians
10. meteorologist	studies atmosphere, weather and climate

D. Antonyms

Find the antonyms of the following words in the puzzle and shade them with a pencil:
seldom, admitted, methodical, reality, virtue, vile, indignant, relish, fact

Listening Activity

Listen to two interesting anecdotes about two scientists and complete the sentences.

Speaking Activity

Work with a partner and take turns to share your views and suggestions with the class.

Reading – Library and Genres

Dewey Decimal System & Library Sections

• Reference Section – Dictionaries, Encyclopaedias, Yearbooks, Atlases, Gazetteers
• Stack – All books except Reference
• Journal Section – Current and back issues
• Electronic Section – Computers, Xerox, DVDs, CDs

Genres of Literature

• Fiction – Drama, Poetry, Fantasy, Humour, Fables, Science fiction, Short Story
• Non-fiction – Narratives, Biographies, Autobiographies

Grammar

Passivisation

We use the passive form to say what happens to people and things – to say what is done to them.

Reasons for Passive Construction:

• When the doer of the action is unknown
• When the doer of the action is irrelevant
• When a general truth is being stated
• While writing reports and scientific research papers

Writing

Biographical Sketch

A biographical sketch is a brief summary of a person’s life and achievements.

Steps:

1. Use the third person.
2. Write personal details.
3. Highlight education and work.
4. Mention special contributions.
5. List achievements.

Report Writing

A report is written for a clear purpose. It includes:

• Title
• Introduction
• Scope
• Conclusion

Subject–Verb Agreement (Concord)

• A singular subject takes a singular verb.
• A plural subject takes a plural verb.

Always Plural:
people, police, cattle, a number of, a group of, scissors, tweezers, trousers, shorts, jeans, glasses

Always Singular:
one of, a kind of, a type of, mathematics, politics, civics, economics, physics

End of Unit 3 – Prose: Forgetting