Mississippi Delta Community College - Retrospect Yearbook (Moorhead, MS)

Page 9 text:

Looking back xoe had to come this far up to see what was below. FOREWORD MEMORIES AND THINGS: When what we do now has become obsolete present, relegated to memory, and all that challenge and imbue us now have evanesced from the particular to an overall, purpvoseful general- ity, we will retain nothing of now but memories; and o nly perhaps might we recall that our purpose here at MDJC was to learn. There were so many other things. They always seemed to come first. What then is to be had from a tenure of approximately two years at any one place? Surely, in the expiration of such a substcmtial percentage of our lifetimes, we do, by simply existing, create and achieve more, much more, than academic credit. There are the infinitely complex, dehcate personal associations; there are the quandaries which exhibit the comforting habit of loosening them- selves from happiness remembered; there is much joy, though punctuated at times with great anguish. To sum it all up: The multifarious ingredients of now crystalUze into a distinct reality, the sole judge of which is memory. Memory, the creation of all that time, emotion, and labor. Bad memory, good memory — that memory is the creature that analyzes all that was done and said, that qualifies all things of a present gone by, that is judge in the cruellest trial of all — the trial of one- self. If there be no memory, then that part excluded from memory virtually never transpired, for in the absence of critical memory, no lessons can be learned nor triumphs lauded nor catastrophes mourned. There can have been no living — only the suicidal p er- formance of a tragic role. Bad memory? Good memory? Be honest and learn. Rehve, in part, now the year just past. You can do no greater justice to yourself and to this school than to be decisively, inwardly honest. May your memories he oj happiness and your sorrows he mel- lowed with age.