How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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179 (canvas 199)
The image contains the following text:
What we forget is quite as indicative of our personality
as what we remember. It is futile, therefore, to attempt
to train the memory as if it were an isolated faculty.
We have seen no schools of forgetting, yet a course in
forgetting would probably be more valuable than a course
in memory. But we can train men and women to regard
the future with greater optimism, and when they have
achieved that optimism, their memory for significant,
forward-looking facts, will improve of itself. The failure
of all memory courses is due to the fact that no tricks
of recollection, no exercise of the mnemic “ faculty ” can
ever replace the courage to face problems and to meet
them. Indeed the futile attempt to train memory and
concentration usually ends in the student’s further
perplexity and discouragement. If you remember the
past too well, turn your face toward the future, assured
that happiness is more easily acquired in the normal
conduct of life in the present than in the vain cult of past
glories. If you forget what seems to be essential to the
present, remember this : the difficulties and obstacles
of the future are no worse than the obstacles you have
already conquered in the past.
Of the instruments we use in our unconscious training
for the future, the most interesting, psychologically, are
imagination and the dream. Imagination is the process
of courageous foresight. It is the extension of the scheme
of apperception to the future, the pre-testing and pre¬
examination of possible events, the trial reconstellation of
experiences we have already had, in new terms and new
combinations. Imagination is one of the most valuable
human faculties when it is applied in the service of the
good life, but when it breaks loose from its essential
purpose (the process of clearing the mental jungles in
advance, like a pioneer breaking a trail to a new frontier)
imagination becomes a curse. The daydream is the
imagination and phantasy of the discouraged and down¬
hearted. Daydreamers fear to tackle reality. They
prefer to create a phantastic world of wish-fulfilment as a
substitute for the real fulfilment resulting from the