Remembrance has a rear and front,—
~Emily Dickinson
’T is something like a house;
It has a garret also
For refuse and the mouse,
Besides, the deepest cellar
That ever mason hewed;
Look to it, by its fathoms
Ourselves be not pursued.
I’d never encountered this poem before, and I really like it. I love how Dickinson begins with the mundane–a house, an attic with space for the unwanted and uninvited. In the second stanza, she moves to a grander and more dire tone–“deepest,” “fathoms,” “pursued.”
There’s so much truth in this small poem. It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes’s explanation of memory to Watson:
“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
~ Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Both Holmes and the speaker in Dickinson’s poem note the perils of an unselective memory, and both caution against them. Though Holmes’s is clearly an approach driven by professional need, both these descriptions of memory strike me as stemming from similar worldviews. The difference is that if Holmes clutters his brain-attic, he’ll have a hard time doing his work, while if the speaker in Dickinson’s poem allows unwanted memories to clutter hers, she will be forever “pursued.”
The Emily Project 