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I.
The sense of the past constitutes what William Wordsworth might have called a "primary law of our nature," a fundamental human gift, as potentially civilizing as our gift for love. It is a common, non-literary faculty, embodied very simply in Thomas Hardy's poem, "The Garden Seat":
Its former green is blue and thin,
And its once firm legs sink in and in;
Soon it will break down unaware,
Soon it will break down unaware.
At night when reddest flowers are black
Those who once sat thereon come back;
Quite a row of them sitting there,
Quite a row of them sitting there.
With them the seat does not break down,
Nor winter freeze them, nor floods drown,
For they are as light as upper air,
They are as light as upper air!
The poem is about the ghost-life that hovers over some of the furniture of our lives, about the way objects can become temples of the spirit. This garden seat is not just an objet, a decorous antique; it has become a point of entry into a common emotional ground of memory and belonging. It transmits the climate of a lost world and keeps alive a domestic intimacy with a reality which might otherwise have vanished. The more we are surrounded by such things, the more feelingly we dwell in our own lives. The air which our imaginations inhale in their presence is not musty but bracing.
It could even be maintained that objects thus seasoned by human contact possess a kind of moral force. They insist upon human solidarity and suggest obligations to the generations who have been silenced, drawing us into some covenant with them. In this passage by Pablo Neruda, for example, although the poet is not explicitly concerned with the object as capsule of time past, he is nevertheless testifying to the power of the inanimate, its aura of persuasiveness:
It is well, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coalbins, barrels and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth...