Morrell, a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I think that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men—these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.
To be able to forget means sanity. To remember everything means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary was the problem of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I desired was entirely to forget.
There were the boyhood memories of other times and places. Sometimes solitary life-prisoners resurrected and looked upon the sun again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the boy resurrect?
But how? Hypnotism should do it. But first I must tell how, as a boy, I had had these other-world memories.
Let me narrate just one incident. It was up in Minnesota on the old farm. I was nearly six years old. A missionary, returned from China to the United States, spent the night in our house. It was in the kitchen just after supper, as my mother was helping me undress for bed, and the missionary was showing photographs of the Holy Land.
I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it, first with eagerness, and then with disappointment. It seemed most familiar. Then it seemed strange.
“The Tower of David,” the missionary said to my mother.
“No!” I cried with great positiveness.
“You mean that isn’t its name?” the missionary asked.
I nodded.
“Then what is its name, my boy?”
“Its name is…” I began, then concluded lamely, “I forget.”
“It doesn’t look the same now,” I went on after a pause.
Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph.
“I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing.” He pointed with his finger. “That is the—”
But here I broke in again, pointing on the left edge of the photograph.
“That name you just spoke,” I said, ”was what the Jews called it. But we called it something else. We called it… I forget.”
“Listen to the youngster,” my father chuckled. “You’d think he’d been there.”
I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all seemed strangely different. My father laughed, but the missionary handed me another photograph.