Of Old Things and New

by Francisco B. Icasiano

A strange feeling possesses me everytime I pass by the Church of San Agustin, in Intramuros, during my daily rambling as a newspaperman. At first, I merely observed that the humid odor of three-hundred-year-old walls and the sight of arched doors and grazed windows with colored glass panes were vaguely familiar.

But passing that way for the ninth time one cool morning, I was overcome by the sudden realization of the full meaning of my early sensations. I have it! I almost cried; and I stood in front of the church as one in ecstasy, my eyes fairly avid to devour the whole of the world that I could see with one sweeping glance and my heart eager to contain the whole of life in one split second.

The sensation is explained, at least in part. I grew up in a convent and spent most of my childhood playing in the shade of a mossy arched of the church of San Rafael, which was founded by the Augustinian friars at the foot of the hills of Bulacan. I knew every crevice of the church wall, I knew where the birds built their nests and where the bats had in the daytime. Inside the church were paintings of saints and angels and good people in long, flowing robes and walking in billowing clouds. How vivid they still are! As I gazed at them in my childhood, I could see them move and breathe and talk to me about their lives and their ways during the Middle Ages. They told me how one of the ran in and out of a burning hospital, each time carrying out a helpless patient. Then there was one prince who gave up his title and his wealth to discover his soul in meekness among the meek. There too were men who laid down their lives for strangers whom they had never met. They told me so many such lovely episodes of the early Christian era that I with growing and imaginative mind and my intensive reading of the lives of saints and heroes, seemed to live in their time.

So, as I stood near the wall of San Agustin church, all my childhood came fleeting back to me with appalling freshness, and my eyes wildly expected to meet the saints and the heroes with whom I had communed intimately long ago. For an instant, the churchyard was converted, into court peopled with crusaders, saints and martyrs, hooded monks in prayer, nuns singing in the choir, royalty in their respective garments, ladies-in-waiting, knights in armor, and toubadors - and I, of the twentieth century, intimately at one with them.

I am beginning to be sure now that my strange feeling was not awakened merely by a memory of some past things, some experience - stirred to life by a mossy wall, an arched door, tiny crevices, the stagnant odor of tallow, or the smell of bats. No, for there are things we stumble upon which appear familiar even at first sight. If it is memory, it cannot be the memory that depends upon time and space but that memory which is the triumph of sacramental things over time. It is the realization that we of this temporal life may some day emancipate ourselves from all consideration of time and space.

Such a memory suggests itself to us in many forms and ways. If we take some such observations as "the water which reflects the blue of the sky is bluer than the sky," we at once feel that we have made such an observation before even if we have never done so. And it goes for all statements of truth. When we read Aristotle's observation, "Thought is the thought of thought," the truth of it makes us feel like swearing that we had known it long before we read Aristotle. There is at once swearing that we had known it long before we read Aristotle. There is at once freshness and a memory in all truth; it has age and yet it is young.

And the same holds for all things beautiful and good. We see a strange bird flying across the morning, over the top of tall ipil tree and, although we may be for the first time seeing that kind of bird flying that way over an ipil tree just so tall when the morn is in that particular mood, we could almost declare, without the slightest sensation or suspicion of dishonesty, that such a grateful sight and surely met our eyes before - perhaps more than once. Our memory of the sight is so vivid that it seems to be present to our physical eye.

Or if we read a woman leaving all her worldly goods to an orphanage, we do not have to know or the looks of her, we nod approvingly and, perhaps with a moist eye, we sigh "Good old soul! God bless her!" it seems to have happened before our very eyes. We don't have to be shown. Such is the stuff history is make of; that is why we do not question facts of history.

I suspect that it is not so much the memory of mortal man as that of the immortal soul that gives us this feeling of strange affinity with such strange things. The soul must have a memory too, the memory of an ideal that never grows old but is forever new and true and beautiful and good - a perfection which the soul ever particles, in symbols and suggestion; now coming in the form of a bit of truth now in the shape and color some beautiful object, now as the sight of something good, and at rare moments as something all at once true and beautiful and good. But ever it is as old as time and as fresh as experience.

Francisco B. Icasiano was born in San Rafael, Bulacan, on June 4, 1903. He served as an Editor in Chief of the Philippine Collegian during his college days at the University of the Philippines. Among his short stories were "Of Old Things and New" and "Sonia", a short story written after the death of his first child, Sonia, who shows wonder why the stars shine in the sky, why raindrops fall from heaven, and why grass grows anywhere in the surface of the ground.

Philippine Literature

Saturday, March 9, 2019