On the side of a big rock, near where we live, you can read these words in bright white paint: “I LOVE YOU, CHICKEN FARMER!” I like that. I like memorials, our Word of the Week. Sometimes it’s a sign set down by the person himself, as when my cousins Joe and Tom and Frankie painted their initials on the rocky approach to a cliff a few hundred yards behind our dead-end street. “Beech trees keep their bond,” I’ve written, and if you find an older one of those trees in a place where young people have been, expect to see initials and names carved into the trunk, especially the names of a boy and girl in love. I remember a large marble slab set into the wall of my boyhood church, bearing the names of people who donated money to the church for the installment of the stained glass windows, I suppose, or to pay the Italian painter they hired to cover the whole interior, including the ceiling, with sacred art. One name remains etched in my mind: “Mrs. Nellie Naylor.”
Of course, you can overdo any good thing. Alexander the Great left memorials wherever he went on his conquests, founding city after city and naming them after himself. That’s why we have an Alexandria in Egypt, and a Kandahar in Afghanistan. Most of the cities he founded, though, have long since fallen into ruin and oblivion, where “the lone and level sands stretch far away,” or some newer city, like Herat in Afghanistan, has been built near one of them or on top of it. Yet the instinct for building memorials to people we honor is sound and good. There’s a fine memorial to Abraham Lincoln in the Chicago park named for him; and why should not the state that calls itself “Land of Lincoln” have such a memorial? Why, he himself etched his words indelibly on the American mind, when he went to Gettysburg, several months after the battle there, to dedicate a cemetery in honor of the Union soldiers who fell.
Very often, streets and roads become memorials when the places or the persons for which they were named have ceased to be. We live on School Street, but there is no school on it. There was an Academy Street a hundred feet below the base of the cliff I mentioned above, but the “academy” it was named for lasted only a few years, a long time ago. There is a Town Farm Road in the Rhode Island town where we lived for 21 years, so named for a “Poor Farm” the town ran there in the 19th century — a place where the destitute or the homeless could be cared for and could sometimes be set to useful employment. That name is the more poignant, because not only is the farm not there; there is no such in the entire state, not anymore — the very idea of such a place seems to have been lost. It is well then that at least the name remains.
Milton cared about names, not so much because he was a great poet, but because he was a human being. What can be more of an annihilation than to lose your very name? The fallen angels no longer retain their names in heaven: they are blotted out. Satan’s name, says Raphael, “is heard no more in heaven. Whatever power the fallen angels had, they turned toward evil: “Therefore eternal silence be their doom.” When the wicked Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi dies, he says, in his despair, “And now, I pray, let me be laid by, and never thought of.” Wicked or not, that’s the state of man according to nature alone. Then it’s as the Psalmist says: Our days are swift, the wind sweeps over us, and our place knows us no more. But that’s not the last word. Man forgets, but God remembers. Why, Milton gives us memorials in heaven itself, emblazoned on flags, “holy memorials, acts of zeal and love / Recorded eminent.” And I think it needn’t be on flags or stones or walls or the trunks of beech trees. Somehow, the history of a human being is written on the face. We see it even here on earth, in this life; in the bright eyes of an old man who retains his frolic humor from childhood and all his years; in the kindly regard of an old woman like my grandmother, my father’s mother, meek and gentle, not unacquainted with sadness.
I’m very fond of that happy inspiration Dante had, of setting two rivers at the top of the mountain of Purgatory. One is Lethe, which causes you to forget all your sins, making them seem to you as if someone else had committed them. But the other, the climactic one, is Eunoe — pronounced euphoniously, with four syllables, eh-oo-no-EH. When you are baptized in that river, you come forth remembering all the good things you have ever done. And I guess that if you pressed Dante about it, he’d say that even those things you hadn’t forgotten before you were plunged into that river would appear before you in their fullness, as if they were immediate, and brighter than they were even at the time.
Today, as our American readers will know, is our Memorial Day, when we honor the soldiers who died in the service of our nation. But long ago, people began also to honor the dead who had served in uniform, even if they did not die in the line of duty. And while people were at it, they began to decorate the graves of all their loved ones — in fact, the first name for the holiday, instituted in 1868, was Decoration Day. It’s a federal holiday, and so the schools will be closed, and the post office, but that makes it a good day for baseball in the afternoon, and family get-togethers, and cookouts; the unofficial first day of summer.
The word comes to us from Latin, both directly and through Old French, and it’s related to a large group of words in our language-family that have to do with memory, the mind, and thought. Mimir was the Old Norse god of memory, whose severed head Odin kept nearby, to give him good advice, because when you have a strong memory of the past, the chances and changes of the future don’t surprise you so much. The Greek goddess Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses: it’s memory that inspires you to sing epic poetry, as it’s mindfulness that causes you to look up at the stars. The Hindu mantra is a chant of praise, a sacred text committed to the mind and heart, though, alas, the English adoption of the word has turned ironic and sour, suggesting something you repeat but do not really think about. But maybe the most charming cousin is the Old French mignon, which wasn’t a cut of steak, but a sweetheart, a darling, a “minion” but without any irony. And that, dear Readers, brings us all the way back to the beech tree!
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