CHAPTER VI


There is more than the germ of truth in things erroneous in the child's
definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be able to forget
means sanity. Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy. So the
problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for
possession of me, 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--the "trailing
clouds of glory" of Wordsworth. If a boy had had these memories, were
they irretrievably lost when he had grown to manhood? Could this
particular content of his boy brain be utterly eliminated? Or were these
memories of other times and places still residual, asleep, immured in
solitary in brain cells similarly to the way I was immured in a cell in
San Quentin?

Solitary life-prisoners have been known to resurrect and look upon the
sun again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the boy
resurrect?

But how? In my judgment, by attainment of complete forgetfulness of
present and of manhood past.

And again, how? Hypnotism should do it. If by hypnotism the conscious