18. Memory and Narrative

When the modern philosopher Martin Heidegger ruminates on what exactly we mean by "think," "thinking," and "thought,"¹ he reaches, as he often does, into the etymology of words. In German, denken, "to think," is related to danken, "to thank." Memory is a kind of thinking: Gedächtnis, from the past participle of the verb denken. Most moving and most revelatory to him, however, is the Old English noun for thinking: thonc or thane. The thanc meant not "a notion," but what it is that gives rise to what we now call "thoughts."The thane was "the gathered, all-gathering, thinking that recalls." It was the human being's disposition, our "heart's core."

Truth, for Heidegger, is not correctness, but rather what is otherwise hidden from us but now revealed—through thinking. The etymology of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, is "not being the victim of oblivion, lethe." (Lethe was the river in the underworld that caused those who drank from it to forget.) Thinking and philosophy have the task of revealing. Real thinking takes place in the thane, and it is what makes us human: the more thoughtless we are, the less human.

The assumption is that something exists which is to be "dis-covered," something that needs to be revealed in order to be known. Thinking, however, is not questing by nature, but rather receptive. It "receives a call" from the nature of things, and it responds to that call. Thinking, then, is grateful in its essence: it receives and responds. German famously uses the words es gibt ("it gives") for English "there is" and "there are." (We ourselves talk of what we call a "received" supposition as "a given.") Being, then, is not a thing but an event. It is an event that mere beings forget. And human beings are called to recollect this event of the gift of Being. Thinking, says Heidegger, cannot force the gift of the call, from What Is, to think. We do not think by willing. All we can do is prepare ourselves so that we can hear the call when it comes, listen and attend to "the given," accept it, and respond. The overcoming of forgetting is what the thanc in its thinking is called to do.

"Both memory and thanks," writes Heidegger, "move and have their being in the thanc." By "memory" he means "a constant abiding with something," not only what has passed but what is present and leading to the future. "Memory" is a form of awareness; it is attention paid; it is faithfulness. (A faithful person, we say in English as in German, is "true.") Like thinking, remembering is a grateful action. It is not only recollection, but also "an unrelinquishing and unrelenting retention" in the thanc.

"In giving thanks," Heidegger continues, "the heart gives thought to what it has and what it is."² The supreme thanks would be thinking—remembering the gift of our being. And utter thanklessness would be thoughtlessness. Heidegger wonders which came first—thinking, or thanking? Both involve memory. Yet thanks, like verbal thanking or a return gift or a votive offering, is something that one gives. "Pure thanks," says Heidegger, "is not giving back. It is simply thinking.... This thinking ... does not need to repay, nor be deserved, in order to give thanks. Such thanks is not a recompense; but it remains an offering."

In ancient Greek, charis meant, at first, only "favour." This word later came to mean "gratitude,"³ and when it did, the expression we would translate as "I am grateful" was most frequently "I know charis" or "I have charis": that is, "I know the favour [which I have received]" or "I have the favour and I know it."⁴ Gratitude was something one knew. It involved the thought that the benefactor was the source of favour, and this thought was deemed to require declaration on the spot: "I know charis." In Indian Buddhism the tradition lists krtajna and krtavedana as the nearest thing to "gratitude"; these words mean literally "the act of being aware of what has been done (krta) for me." Repaying the kindness will be the next step—but the terms limit themselves to the awareness.⁵

Gratitude on the practical level depends on the use of one's reason; there is an appropriateness about it. A modern ethicist has pointed out that if you helped someone not knowing that she was a previous benefactor, you would not have helped her out of gratitude. He concludes that gratitude must involve benefiting others discriminately.⁶ This is in a sense correct: we do try, out of gratitude, to find ways of helping specifically those who have helped us; gratitude is personal. Yet it is a mistake to limit gratitude to a strictly targeted reciprocity; one could give, for example, to one person out of gratitude to someone else. If gratitude is in part knowing, it has far greater scope and depth than precise reciprocity allows, as Heidegger's approach has already demonstrated.

The declaration of one's gratitude—having the favour, knowing it, and saying so—takes place out of a recognition that a benefactor's thoughts, intentions, and efforts cannot, in fact, be repaid like a debt. Indeed, they cannot be "repaid" at all; they can only be acknowledged. The word acknowledgement entails knowing, as does the Latin-derived term recognition. This acknowledging and recognizing are what the French most commonly take to mean gratitude itself: reconnaissance.⁷ Recognizing by means of saying one is grateful actually constitutes, in some circumstances, a return gift.⁸

Seneca counsels the use of reason in giving: "No gift can be a benefit unless it is given with reason, since every virtuous act is accompanied by reason." We should therefore consider, he says, when to give, to whom, and how and why. The person chosen should be one who is worthy of receiving, one who will be grateful: the likelihood that he will make a return, however, should not be a criterion. "It often happens that the grateful man is one who is not likely to make a return, while the ungrateful man is one who has done so." Seneca does lend support, however, to the Latin adage that "a farmer does not commit his seeds to sand."⁹ Seneca's noble approach to giving and thanking, at least in this part of his Book Four, is close to the ideal found in the Christian Gospels, where giving should indeed require thinking, but not figuring out one's own advantage. Yet in the Gospels, God himself fails to heed the proverb about not bothering to sow seed in sand: in the parable of the Sower, the seed that is God's Word falls (is given) everywhere, in the same way that the sun shines "indiscriminately," on the just and the unjust alike.¹⁰ Thinking takes place when human beings imitate God in their giving, but thinking does not select the receiver on the grounds of her moral worthiness, or because she is likely to "give back"—or, indeed, be grateful.

The thinking that ought to go on in the process of both giving and being grateful is encouraged by social customs. These include leaving what to give up to the giver, who has therefore to ponder what gift might please this particular beneficiary; and the injunction to wait a while before thanking a host for hospitality or before making a return gift. Gratitude can actually be evoked by reflection. This is the reason why we sometimes ask people to stand for two minutes in silence, on Armistice Day, for example. The commemoration of the fallen in the First World War, which has taken place at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of every year since 1918, changed its name in 1946 to Remembrance Day, to include a memorial of the dead in the Second World War as well. Taking time out to pay attention and to remember is meant at least in part to invite people to make the further step (in liberty, because gratitude is gratis) of being grateful to those who "gave their lives," as we say, for their country's cause and protection.

When the early sociologist Georg Simmel turns his mind to the two questions perhaps most fundamental to sociology—"How and why do societies change?" and "What is it that enables them to stay the same, even as they change?"—he chooses Faithfulness and Gratitude as two significant and related strategies that human groups employ to achieve stability.¹¹ Faithfulness for Simmel is keeping commitments, while gratitude "establishes the bond of interaction." Both are necessary for society because they supplement the legal order. (We might now add that they help fill in the huge gaps in human well-being that "the market" cannot satisfy.) Gratitude and faithfulness assure continuance, especially needed in an individualistic society. "If every grateful action," Simmel writes, "which lingers on from good turns received in the past, were suddenly eliminated, society (at least as we know it) would break apart." He insists on the "atmosphere of obligation" with which social pressure surrounds thanksgiving, and on gratitude's creation of "microscopic but infinitely tough threads" that bind society together: "Gratitude is perhaps the only feeling which, under all circumstances, can be morally demanded and rendered...[It] seems to reside in a point in us which we do not allow to change.... Gratitude, as it were, is the moral memory of mankind."

Given the extraordinary importance to society of gratitude in Simmel's view, and the fundamental role for our very humanity that Heidegger attributes to thanking, it is remarkable how often, in cynical witticisms, we hear the complaint that true gratitude is seldom to be found—that an injury is nursed for years, for example, but a benefit is soon forgotten.¹² Seneca even says that it is unkind to be angry with someone who has not remembered the kindnesses one has done him in the past, because such forgetfulness is "a universal failing," and you are probably guilty of it yourself.¹³ "The memory is a very frail vessel," he adds. And when it founders, gratitude sinks with it.

Seneca advises, therefore, giving someone a durable gift, "for they are few indeed who are so grateful that they think of what they have received even if they do not see it." We have noted how hard it is for a child to remember to say "thank you" for a gift when it is no longer in her arms to remind her. Favours that are not concrete presents are easy to forget. Good manners, Seneca continues, demand that we never remind people of what we have done for them, for that might seem to be asking for something in return. But an object is capable of reviving the memory that is fading: "I shall be more willing to give wrought than coined silver; more willing to give statues than clothing or something that will wear out after brief usage. Few there are whose gratitude survives longer than the object given..."¹⁴ It is notable that even in Seneca's day money could be thought of as not memorable enough to constitute a personal gift. It cannot adorn anything or be displayed; it will soon be spent and forgotten; it is simply not interesting enough, in and of itself. Rena Lederman describes how shells among the Mende people of Papua New Guinea constitute "mnemonic records." People say that they make a distribution of riches "big," as money cannot, for money can neither adorn nor be displayed. And furthermore, "with shells people have more to talk and argue about."¹⁵

An important feature of gratitude is its ability to bind a person into memory and into a rich story of interrelationship. Being part of a story is essential to human personhood. A person (as opposed to an "individual") is inextricable from interrelationship with others; one is a character in one's own story, as well as in the stories of other people. "Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal," writes Alasdair MacIntyre, adding that "I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'"¹⁶ One could also say that decisions can arise out of what stories one wants to enact. And James Alison reminds us that "someone without a memory not only does not know what happened in the past, but quite literally does not know who he or she is: that is what happens in grave cases of amnesia."¹⁷

Memory creates narrative, but narrative can also ensure the durability of memory. And a tale can last and achieve constant retelling through social custom: impressive stories are told beautifully and repeated, and they may be deliberately attached to physical, durable objects. Ancient Spartan soldiers would sacrifice to the Muses, the goddesses of memory and poetry, before they went into battle, in their determination to do deeds worthy of being remembered in song for generations.¹⁸ Athletic victories won twenty-five centuries ago in Greece are still recalled because poets of the quality of Pindar wrote odes of praise for the victors, not only celebrating their triumphs but also adorning their family histories with erudite and striking mythological exempla; the glory of winning was turned into mystical song and remains available for contemplation today.

In Greek epic, funeral games were celebrated for dead heroes: the prizes won in the games¹⁹ would be handed down through generations in the victors' families with the stories of their winning attached to them, the objects themselves remaining as reminders and as evocations of each family's noble past. (The custom persists in the display of sporting trophies on modern family mantelpieces.) The tomb of the dead man was erected as a monument when the games were over. The one for the dead Achilles was itself remembered in epic song:

And then we, the sacred army of Argive spearmen, heaped a great and excellent funeral mound up over Achilles' bones on a strand jutting forward on the broad Hellespont, so that it might be seen far over the ocean by men, both those who are born now and those who shall be hereafter....You were very dear to the gods. So you did not lose your name even when you died, Achilles. There should be noble renown for you always among men.²⁰

In modern times we have war memorials to honour those fallen in battle. But in the context of our very different society, such monuments are liable to elicit reactions quite dissimilar from the admiration offered to the splendour of Achilles. In Britain for example, monuments raised after the First World War remember ordinary soldiers, not men of "renown"; they refer to "everyman" killed in battle.²¹ The ideal figures depicted on war memorials were taken to be those who had volunteered to fight, those who first responded to the call to arms, and who, as it turned out, died in the greatest numbers. The act of having freely chosen to enlist made gratitude to them a natural response. These young men (and women, because for the first time in history ordinary non-combatants, including women, were commemorated by war memorials) were understood to have died saving their country from even worse horrors than the war had spawned. People felt, and were encouraged to feel, that it was incumbent on the survivors to ensure that these sacrifices, these gifts of their lives, had not been offered in vain.²²

But the latter half of the twentieth century has taught us a very different attitude to war: we are capable far more easily of regarding the lives of our war dead as pitifully wasted. We feel horrified at their loss, and guilty. In the Second World War there was conscription; the huge numbers of soldiers were not a professional fighting class and were not, on the whole, volunteers. Non-combatant citizens—people like ourselves—died as horribly as soldiers did and in even greater numbers. Gratitude is a response to the behaviour of others, not ourselves.

More recently, we have taken to erecting walls of names of the dead—all of them grouped together and not only those from a specific town. (It was after the First World War that it became common practice to list alphabetically on local war memorials the names of all soldiers who had died. Meanwhile the people who erected the monuments, who in the past always expected to be named on them, began to receive no mention; artists signed their work discreetly or not at all.) We feel that we owe it to the dead that they should not remain anonymous, that we should pay personal attention to each one of them, regardless of class or rank. Here we might locate an element of gratitude, although we often say we are grateful for the lives of the fallen rather than for their deaths; gratitude is always an intensely specific and personal matter. A relatively new practice is to recite all the names of the dead—both combatant and non-combatant victims, from all over—aloud, one name after the other, the very time needed to say all the names being a reminder of the extent of our loss. Reading the names unites the living in sympathy. The idealists among us try to feel too that we can most appropriately "give something back" to the dead by preventing war in the future, that in this way we can try to give meaning to these otherwise senseless deaths. Gratitude is always profoundly meaningful; it springs from meaning and also creates it. The solid monuments (the root of this word is mind; a monument is literally "something that calls to mind") are there to keep all of us thinking and remembering. Gratitude is about making the past continue to affect the present.

It may also reach into the future. People who leave money to others when they die normally give because they are gratefully mindful of their friends, and of course without any hope that they will receive a "return," other than the thought that their inheritors might perhaps feel grateful for having been remembered in the giver's will. Leaving money to members of one's family may be different, where people think of themselves less as individuals than as parts of a family, to the fortunes of which they must make their contribution. It is certainly true that estate decisions about who shall receive what do exert power beyond the grave.²³

Psychologists have located a thought-pattern that they name "generativ-ity." It occurs in highly successful middle-aged or older people who have usually maintained a lifelong habit of gratitude. They remember the opportunities and advantages they enjoyed earlier in life, and in gratitude to everyone who ever helped them and in a desire to help others less fortunate, they endow scholarships, build libraries, pay for research projects, provide sports stadia, and so on. In return, it is true, they enhance their already glowing reputations. Many of them insist on having their names attached to their gifts to the public—but others are modest about receiving acknowledgements or may even ask for their gifts to remain anonymous. They provide material for discussion among social scientists reluctant to admit instances of "altruism." "High generativity" is said to derive from "a commitment story"—an instance, perhaps, of what Simmel calls "faithfulness"—that ends up inspiring the powerful to help others.²⁴

Much of the meaningfulness inherent in gratitude flows from this linkage of past to present to future. A complete sequence of actions and characters, people giving objects or doing favours, receiving, being grateful, and giving again forms the backbone of many stories and subplots, which people remember and tell, handing them on to one another and to their children. We have looked already at todah, the grateful memory-and-praise of Judaism, the refusal, over thousands of years, ever to forget God's favours to his people.

Gratitude stories, however, may be about forgetting as well as remembering—forgetting, that is, as virtue in the giver. One must give and forget—or, better, give without pausing to calculate. One thinks, but not about one's own advantage. Folklore, which may be defined as "the traditional stories and wisdom of the people," agrees with the message of the Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan who—in contrast to the pure and the haughty, those mindful of the risk to themselves and their reputations—forgets his status as a member of a despised minority, and helps the wounded man because he has been hurt; the Samaritan is simply "moved to compassion." He never wonders what could be in it for him, or takes into account his own loss of time and money, or stops to remember the hurt he has endured through being classified as excluded.²⁵

The Tale of the Kind and the Unkind Girls has been collected by folklorists in hundreds of versions from northern Europe through Russia to India, and from Japan, Africa, and Jamaica.²⁶ It is a story about a good girl who, in the course of a perilous journey, wins gold. When she returns home with her reward, the bad girl sets off to do the same, but comes home having received only toads or snakes. A common episode in the story concerns the encounters the first girl makes on her journey. First, an apple tree begs to have its abundant ripe fruit picked. Despite the urgency of her quest, the girl stops, shakes the tree, collects the harvest in bags, and then goes on. Next she meets an oven, crying out to have some perfectly baked hot loaves removed from its interior. She turns aside and performs the service. Then a cow, with a pail hanging from her horns in the Scandinavian versions, says she needs milking because her udder is full. The girl pauses in her journey and complies.

When the Kind Girl has completed her adventures, she returns home with her prize: a scuffed old box, which she preferred, on being given the choice, to a showy and pretentious one. The old witch or ogre or some other monstrous being, enraged because the girl did not prefer the pretty box as expected, tears after her. When the cow, the oven, and the tree are asked if they have seen the fleeing girl, they steadfastly do not reveal that she has passed by or where she is. When the Kind Girl opens the box at home and finds gold in it, the Unkind Girl decides to set out to acquire gold for herself. But intent on achieving her end, she ignores the cries of the tree, the oven, and the cow; later, she chooses the glittering box. She too is pursued, and in some versions beaten or killed, unaided by the creatures she failed to help. In any event her box contains everything nasty, and no gold.

An important principle demonstrated by the story is that one ought naturally to do what needs doing. Ripe fruit on trees, bread baked to perfection, a cow's udder ready for milking are matters that will not wait. They need to be attended to at once, just as the Good Samaritan attended at once to the needs of the man beaten up by robbers—even if these urgencies do not appear to be part of the narrative of one's own life, and even if one is very busy. Ignoring the right moment—missing what Greek philosophers called the kairos²⁷—by disregarding pain and allowing spoilage and waste is, in folklore, a criminal lapse. Ignoring is wicked, but doing the right thing is not on that account a matter for self-congratulation either. One acts because something needs doing and then one forgets about it. A grateful person remembers and steps in to help a benefactor when an opportunity arises—but the memory associated with gratitude is a virtue not of the giver but of one who has received. The tale tells us that giving without any desire for a return gift is what in fact rewards the giver. A gift has to "disappear" completely before it will bear fruit. Calculation of one's own advantage is fatal. "Returns" are always unexpected—out of the giver's control entirely.

An ancient device for producing an ethical effect by means of a story is to tell of animals behaving extraordinarily well; this tactic delivers a heavy rebuke to wicked human beings. Animals, for instance, are grateful; they remember favours done. As late as the nineteenth century Mark Twain uses the technique in an adage: "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."²⁸ Often in folktales we hear of the weak, against all odds, aiding the strong out of a sense of gratitude. In one of Aesop's fables, for example, a lion saves the life of a menaced mouse, knowing the creature's frailty and uselessness. Later the lion is caught in a net and the mouse, remembering, returns the favour by chewing a way out for the lion. Dolphins always fascinated ancient Greek seafarers because of their intelligence and their habit of playing around boats. Koiranos of Paros once, standing at a dockside, saw some dolphins caught in a fisherman's net, bought them, and set them free. He was later almost drowned in a shipwreck, but a school of dolphins rescued and carried him to shore on their backs. Years after, when Koiranos died and was cremated on the seashore, the dolphins gathered in the water near the beach to attend his funeral; only when the fire was quenched did they swim away.²⁹

The earliest trace of the folktale of "Androcles and the Lion" has been found in Aulus Gellius (ca. AD 180). Aelian (second to third century) retells the story, he says, to show that "memory is an attribute even of animals."³⁰ In his version Androcles, the slave of a Roman senator, commits some offence and flees to save his life, to the desert in Libya, where he takes shelter in a cavern. His refuge turns out to be the lair of a lion, who returns from hunting to find the terrified man cowering in its cave. But far from attacking him, the lion whimpers and holds out its paw; it has been pierced by a stake. Androcles draws out the stake, and the lion prostrates itself before its benefactor. The two become friends and henceforth live together, sharing their meals—raw for the lion and cooked for the man.

After three years, Androcles' hair grows long in the wilderness and he develops an itch. He leaves his refuge to remedy his discomfort, but is caught, bound, and shipped off to Rome, where he is condemned to be eaten alive by wild beasts before the crowds in the Circus Maximus. When the lion that is to devour him is released into the arena, it approaches Androcles but, "letting its whole body sink down, threw itself at his feet." Androcles, in his turn recognizes this lion as his Libyan friend and "table companion," flings his arms around it, to the amazement of the spectators. They think that Androcles must be a magician, and a leopard is let loose to kill him. The lion (proving thereby that its power was in no way weakened by its devotion to Androcles) tears the leopard to pieces. At this point questions are asked, and when the spectators hear the story, they "shout aloud that both man and lion must be set free."³¹

Part of this story, which no doubt had many variants,³² was told of Saint Gerasimus of Lycia in Asia Minor, who founded a monastery near Jericho; he died in AD 475. Here the wounded and healed lion became "tamer than a domestic animal" and was set to look after the monastery's water-carrying donkey while it was at pasture. One day a caravan of merchants stole the donkey. The lion returned to the monastery, dejected. On being questioned, it could only look back silently and miserably over its shoulder at Gerasimus. "Thou hast eaten him," scolded the abbot. "Blessed be God! But henceforth thou must do what the donkey did." And the lion had to carry water for the community. One day the thieves passed by again, accompanied by the donkey. The lion frightened them off and returned in triumph to the monastery, leading the donkey by the reins held in its mouth, and three camels in addition, bringing up the rear. The grateful and forgiving lion, christened Jordan, refused to eat when Gerasimus died, but lay down on his master's grave and beat its head upon the earth, roaring. After a few days Jordan himself was dead.³³

The tale was adopted for the hagiography of Saint Jerome, whose name was spelled Geronimus (easily confused with Gerasimus), and who also lived for a while in the desert of the Holy Land. The lion became Jerome's attribute. Christian themes easily attached themselves to the story of the Grateful Lion. The encounter in the wild, for example, was popular in Christian myths, where the Desert Outside, a liminal space, is often a place of epiphany. The lion, its paw pierced, was taken to be a figure of Christ (who is often symbolized by a lion in Christian art), hidden within the needy; Jesus had said that anyone who helped "the least of his brethren" did so him.³⁴ Gratitude could, in the Christian dispensation, be felt by God towards human beings.³⁵

Isaiah's vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, where "the wolf lives with the lamb, the panther lies down with the kid, calf and lion cub feed together, and a little child shall lead them,"³⁶ was drawn into a new view of heroic behaviour. Where Homer's lion—roaring, eyes glaring, lashing its ribs with its tail—had been a simile for the wrath of Achilles and the terror he inspired,³⁷ these Christian lions were proofs of a saintly hero's gentleness. Friendship with a lion had become a sign of special grace made manifest in the generous and wise.³⁸

There were several further examples in medieval epic of saints accompanied by lions. One of these joined his paws together, "piez joinz," for his master, the hero Yvain, as a vassal pressed his palms together between the hands of his lord to express his fealty.³⁹ In some of these stories the acquisition of a tamed and grateful lion marks a new stage in the hero's progressive redemption. Perceval, in the epic poem La Queste del Saint Graal, sees a serpent carrying a lion cub in its mouth, with the cub's "crying and roaring" parent following behind. Perceval rescues the cub. The lion takes its baby home and returns to spend the night with Perceval, serving him as his pillow. Perceval dreams of two women, one riding a serpent and the other a lion. He recognizes the lion maiden as "the New Law": he has made his soul's choice by "choosing the lion's side" over that of the serpent.⁴⁰

In many stories in the Western tradition, episodes of thankfulness signify the possibility, or the beginning, of redemption for the person able to feel grateful. In Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitry is a violent and sensual man who in the end is sentenced to twenty years of hard labour for murdering his father—a crime he did not commit. There are intimations in the novel that Dmitry will be saved by being sprung from prison in Siberia. But twice he shows gratitude, and these moments are far more important for his soul than any plan of escape could be. In the first, Dmitry has just had a powerful dream that awakens pity in him for suffering children. Then he hears his lover Grushenka promising never to leave him, and her words awaken him from his dream. A detail shakes him to the depths of his soul: somebody—who it was he never knows—had shown compassion for him by putting a pillow under his head while he was asleep: '"Who put a pillow under my head? Who was that kind person?' he exclaimed with a kind of ecstatic, grateful emotion and in a voice that almost wept, as though God only knew what boon had been accorded him." Dmitry's life, in this moment, has changed. But gratitude was something he already understood, as we find out later, during his trial. There the old German doctor Herzenstube remembers giving a pound of nuts to Dmitry when he was a deprived and abused child. And twenty-three years later Dmitry had come to thank the doctor for this small gift, which had meant so much to him and which he had never forgotten.⁴¹ The effect of these two tiny incidents on the reader is all Dostoyevsky offers of comfort and hope for Dmitry's ultimate destiny. But it is enough.

Our personalities, then, are embedded in a web of memories, to the point where to be deprived of memory is to lose one's identity. Gratitude is deliberate memory, and expression of it a proof of openness to others. And being able to be grateful is an early sign of the possibility of deliverance when we have lost our way, when our very identity is under threat: gratitude points forward. The Man Without a Past (2003), by the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, is about a man so badly injured in a beating that he loses his memory. The film recounts his recovery and eventual salvation; a new and finer identity will be his. His redemption, however, is implicit from the beginning. For when he regains consciousness but not his memory, in the house of people who, he realizes, have taken him in and looked after him without knowing who he is any more than he knows himself, the first words he utters—and they are his first words in the film—are "Thank you."

Ten lepers were once healed by Jesus,⁴² who sent them to the priests (whose job it was to pronounce a leper "cleansed" and so no longer posing a danger of infection to others). On the way there—and not before—they all find they have been cured. Only one of them, however, remembers to whom he owes his amazing recovery. This man "turned back praising God aloud. He threw himself down at Jesus' feet and thanked him." And he is a Samaritan, an outsider. "Were not all ten cleansed? The other nine, where are they?" asks Jesus. The words are not merely a reproach for ingratitude to himself; they express concern for the spiritual infirmity that afflicts the other nine men. Jubilant over their regained health as they are, in their thanklessness and thoughtlessness they are lost. And the man who remembers and is grateful is not only cured, but also saved.