A MIND LIVELY AND AT EASE
It is said that an artist’s work is the sum total of his experience. The artist does not create from a tabula rasa, but from a rich menu of specific and unspecific experience, grey and vague and highly and variously coloured. The artist drafts his own destiny as he drafts his music, his art, his sculpture or his poetry, at least in part. And he is never sure, as Stephen Spender puts it, however confident he may be, whether he has misdirected his energy, or whether his poetry is insignificant and irrelevant or great and important. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 8 August 2000.
A mind lively and at ease
is a gift of fortune
and gives meaning and value
to perceived experience,1
to the deep and rich
satisfaction of my own writing
and to the slow charting of the
progress toward our destiny.
The unperturbed mind
is quickest and can deal
with the vanity of vanities, life,
which we must both accept and
reject, which pierces us with its
nonsense and its strange relations.
1 Jane Austen, Emma.
Ron Price
8 August 2000
As you get older and classrooms and rooms where you have been "jobbed" are behind you, you may want to write an overview of your life. Here is some of mine--I think it throws light on some issues at this site. You may not agree....that is okay...Ron
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ADDENDUM OR EPILOGUE
Having completed my autobiography or, at least, completed a fifth edition in a form that is satisfactory to me in the first two volumes and keeping in mind that I will in all likelihood make additions to it in the years ahead, I want to write a sort of addendum or epilogue in the pages which follow. I write in part because I want to contribute to the world and I want audiences to read my work hoping, among other reasons, to find a new or at least an altered perspective on their lives. Therefore, one of my aims is to try and make my own perspective new—stake out a territory that requires my voice, a voice that has similarities to others but is, in the end, uniquely mine. I feel I have done this in the territory of the Baha’i Faith and autobiography and I hope some readers find some of this uniqueness and enjoy it.
Autobiographical writing has been redefining the meaning of narrative in recent decades, as the explosion of memoirs by writers such as Frank McCourt, Mary Karr, Dave Eggers and Kathryn Harrison, among others, suggests. It may be that, inspite of the best intentions, inspite of my own perception of the quality of this work and the pleasure I take in reading it, my work may not engage the readers in the Baha’i community as much as I’d like to see happen. I think engagement entails defining a common enterprise that newcomers and community veterans can pursue as they try to develop their interpersonal relationships. I think I do this quite well, at least I have tried; such is my personal perception of how successful I have been. But as readers continue in their interacting trajectories in their communities and as they continue to shape their identities in relation to one another, they may not find this book that useful. The roads in our life, paved as they are with good intentions, often do not lead anywhere at all.
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I'll stop here for fear of prolixity.-Ron
