Rain and Memory
"I hear the drizzle of the rain
Like a memory it falls
Soft and warm continuing
Tapping on my roof and walls,"
writes Paul Simon in the opening lines of Kathy's Song, in which the speaker's observation of the rain leads him to lament his first and now former love. One of the more interesting ventures Paul Simon takes in these lines is to associate rain with memory. It's a bold idea, but if you think about it, this association might not be that uncommon. After all, doesn't it seem as if the critical, or we might even say most memorable, scenes in movies are so often punctuated by a setting of pouring rain? There's a classic image of the dramatic moment being depicted amidst heavy rain, be it a tragic death, the tooth-and-nail denouement of an action sequence, or a long-forecasted confession of love. I can think of examples, too, in my own life in which it seemed fitting that a memorable moment was punctuated by downpour. On the evening right after my high school graduation—the cusp of independent adulthood—it rained completely irresponsibly, a straight, unhindered dumping of water. It was a joyous time; that night I remember watching the bulbous drops of rain on the window of the car slowly descending into oblivion as we drove home from the graduation ceremony, and thinking about how I wished that I could preserve that moment, and that the happiness that I felt would remain. Amidst a much gloomier context, Paul Simon offers a similar impression on the individual drops of rain in the last lines of Kathy's Song:
And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I.
"Weave their weary paths and die"—could it be that our association of rain with memory has something to do with the fleetingness of raindrops? Perhaps this is where the sadness comes from, too, in that we recognize that particular moments which we wish we could save—though they may continue to have an effect on us, just as water does on soil—will nonetheless be inaccessible to us afterward. We will be unable to physically see and experience them as we once did.
Now, you might find this way of encapsulating things beautiful. But, if you're like me, in addition to beautiful, you'll also find it somewhat bothersome. Bothersome because what this means is that much of your life is controlled by these brief, rain-like events, over which you can no longer exercise any power once they occur. Consider plotting all your memories on a graph with "life-altering effect" on the y-axis, and time at which they occurred on the x-axis. The resulting curve of "life altering affect versus time" would appear a pretty much flat line at a low value over most of the time—most of the events you can remember didn't change your life—but, here and there, occurring almost randomly, would be these tall, very thin spikes—the events that did change your life. This, by the way, is also how a graph of 'hourly liquid precipitation' versus time will look—if you widen the scope to a whole month or even a year. Now, apart from bothersome, you might even call this unjust. Why should most of your life be determined by these brief jumps into a realm not comparable to normal life? Most of the time you're not even aware that something's going to become a life-changing event while it's happening, so you don't know to act as if it were. It's as if your life were a feudal aristocracy in which a few aloof memories lord it over the majority of common life-happenings. Shouldn't this sort of society warrant rebellion? In the air of Thomas Paine, "small should not rule large."
As one who professes faith in Christ, one of the problems I've encountered is that much of what inspires my faith seems to come from brief, abnormal events in which I've been moved by something or felt that God was active in the things that occurred. On the other hand, to put it in perspective, most of the time I'm not even thinking about God and don't really want to be disrupted by having to do so, either. How, I've wondered, do I reconcile these two states of my supposed faith? I can imagine that those who give up on the idea of Christianity entirely might describe this sort of problem as part of what urged them towards that decision. Someone might plead to them, "But didn't you say that you had that experience where you felt like God was with you?" And they might reply, "Yes—but that was just that one moment; I haven't felt that way ever again, and I don't think I ever will."
At the end of The Brothers Karamazov, a group of elementary-school-aged boys make-up their quarrels with a certain boy among them when they learn that he is dying of pneumonia. This reconciliation occurs to the point that, with it, Dostoyevsky is able to construct, I think, the exact sort of memory-forming moment to which someone might attribute their faith in God, accompanied by the sudden proliferation of things like kindness, forgiveness, hope, joy, which we would associate with Christian ethics. Following the boy's funeral, the young man who is the protagonist of the novel, Alyosha, assembles these boys at a place out in the fields beyond the town where there is a prominent, lone stone set in the ground. Here, Alyosha gives the boys a speech very-much focused on memory. He begins, saying,
"Even though we may be occupied with the most important matters, attain honours or fall into some great misfortune — all the same let us never forget how good we found it here, all of us in association, united by such good and happy feeling, which for this time of our love for the poor boy has possibly made us better than we are in actual fact."
Oddly, though it seems he is aware of its fleetingness, what Alyosha says next praises this event not as a present reality, but as a future memory within these boys' minds. Our hero declares:
"Much is said to you about your education, but a beautiful, sacred memory like that, one preserved from childhood, is possibly the very best education of all… If he gathers many such memories in his life, a man is saved from it all… And even if only one good memory remains within our hearts, then even it may serve some day for our salvation. It may be that we shall later even grow wicked… but perhaps this very memory alone will keep [us] from a great evil, and [we] will have second thoughts, and say: 'Yes, I was good that day, bold and honest.'"
It seems as though, to Dostoyevsky, fleetingness is not such a bad thing after all. In fact, the very tragic nature of the moment—that it will become only memory in the boy's minds and not equal up to what most of their lives will be like—actually gives the moment the power to continue. Though the boys may never be able to reach such a point again, the memory of it will nonetheless define their lives in hindsight. As it turns out, the fate of the droplets of rain is rather similar. We know that, though they disappear into the ground and, in a sense, die, they afterwards continue to affect the soil, to the benefit of plants and other organisms, and also eventually the rock beneath, becoming part of the water cycle, which is such an essential feature of our planet.
Apart from droplets of rain, though, there is another, perhaps more obvious object that can be used metaphorically to convey this idea. A seed, which seems to disappear when it falls into the ground, later gives rise to a plant, and, not only that, determines what kind of plant grows from it. If you've read it, you may have wondered throughout most of the story why Dostoyevsky opens the novel with this verse from the gospel of John. In it, Jesus's words are "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Perhaps Dostoyevsky was thinking of the end of the book when he placed this quote at its beginning.
Like me, you might have felt like the Christian narrative is one which asks you to live a life in which you're always way above normal on the "life-altering effect versus time" graph. And of course you'd say, "well, I don't have the energy for that." But what Dostoyevsky, who likely thought longer about it than a lot of us have, might be saying is that you don't have to; God knows that we have little control over these brief moments that shape us. Rather, he has ways of using them for our redemption. Not far from death, the novelist might be considering a gospel which is more truly 'outside of time'—as we are told is the nature of God. One in which a single bright moment in a dark life might, regardless of what point in time it may have occupied, at whatever final judgment there may be, bring the person to repentance and to choose the side of loving God. Thus, if you have such a memory, which I think many of us do, I would urge you to cling to it, and, in this case, allow the large to be ruled by the small.