My Letters in Australia's Baha'i Archives

THE BASIS FOR AND THE CONTENT OF MY OFFER OF DOCUMENTS
TO THE NATIONAL BAHA’I ARCHIVES OF AUSTRALIA
Preamble:
This statement of some 125 pages and 55,000 words is a description of
the documents I sent to the National Australian Baha’i Archives
belonging, as they do, to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is
of Australia. My decision as to which documents I have decided to send
to these archives and which ones, therefore, were eventually accepted by
the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Australia, is based on
the description and definition of the nature of these archives as outlined in
the Australian Baha’i Archives Acquisition Policy.1
I want to thank the
Archives Department of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís
of Australia for sending me on 28 November 2008 some guidelines
concerning individuals making donations to the archives.1
I see all of the documents I sent to the Australian National Baha’i
Archives as part of the fulfillment of my role in Canada’s international
pioneering experience, its national diaspora or exodus of Baha’is in its
“glorious mission overseas.”2
I also see these documents as part of a
record of my contribution to the spread of the Baha’i Faith in southern
Ontario in Canada’s most southerly towns as far south as Windsor and
Essex county Ontario--through a series of homefront pioneering moves
before and after participating in the opening chapters of the push of the
Baha’i Faith to “the Northernmost Territories of the Western
Hemisphere.”3
It is in this context, the context in which I see these
documents, that this offering is made to both the NSA of the Baha’is of
Canada.
Such are the most general perspectives on the place of my pioneering
experience and my role in the Cause as both a homefront pioneer and an
1
See the email to Ron Price(28/11/08) from the Archives Department of
the NSA of the Baha’is of Australia Inc. containing as it did guidelines
for individuals making donations of these national archives. This email
of 28/11/08 was sent to me in response to my emails of 22/11/08 and
27/11/08 to the Archives Department in connection with what documents
I might send to the national Baha’i archives of Australia.
2
Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Canada, p.69.
2
3
ibid., p.37.
1

international pioneer. I am now living: (a) at the southern end of the
spiritual axis mentioned by Shoghi Effendi in his 1957 letter4
and (b) in
the outer perimeter of a series of concentric circles, circles which define
the spacial parameters of my life, in several interlocking and important
ways. The southern pole of this axis where I now live, where I have lived
and where in all likelihood my body will one day be buried is "endowed
with exceptional spiritual potency."5
Many years of my life have been
lived at several points along the southern extremity of this pole, this
spiritual axis: in Perth and South Hedland Western Australia, in Gawler
and Whyalla South Australia, in Ballarat and Melbourne Victoria and in
several towns of Tasmania as far south as Zeehan. All of these points lie,
too, at the outer perimeter of the ninth concentric circle whose center is
the "Bab’s holy dust."6
The following is a brief statement, a brief outline, of the documents that
seem to me to be of relevance to a national archive. It goes without
saying, of course, that the decision to house this material in the Canadian
Baha’i archive, in the end, is to be left with the NSA of the Baha’is of
Canada. I look forward to hearing from the Archives Department in
Canada where I have decided to make this donation of documents. And
finally it also goes without saying that I will be happy when whatever
eventuates from this offer of a gift to the national archives. Although it
was accepted and then housed in the NBAA by the end of 2010, time will
tell what happens to all this “paper.” If the decision is that my material is
not deemed relevant, in the long term, that is fine with me. I look forward
to further communication in relation to this statement in the years ahead
when I will have ceased to inhabit this earthly life.
A. Archives Defined as National In Significance:
Further to my emails of 27 and 28 November 2008 that I received from
the National Baha’i Archives(NBA) Coordinator in Australia, Margaret
Anderson, in response to my own emails of 27 and 22 November 2008, I
sent to her three categories of material for the NBA of Australia to
consider as gifts to the NBA of Australia. They were categories defined
as of national significance in their email to me of 28 November 2008,
quoting as they did from the National Baha’i Archives Policy:
Acquisitions Guidelines. I outline those same three categories here and
4
Shoghi Effendi, Letters from the Guardian to Australia and New
Zealand, NSA of the Baha'is of Australia, 1970, p.138.
5
idem
6
Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1965, p.96.
2

eventually heard from Margaret in the weeks and months ahead in
connection with this donation, this gift to the NBAA.
1. Journals and diaries of pioneering activities;
2. Correspondence with Baha’i friends which is about Baha’i subjects,
events and activities; and
3. Published and unpublished works.
B. More Detailed Delineation of the Content of My Contributions,
My Gifts, In The Above Three Categories of Material to the National
Baha’i Archive:
The first category of “individual papers” that I discuss below is
“journals.” Whether my journals show the development of the Baha’i
community in Canada or Australia as mentioned as the defining feature
for what the Archives Department look for in Journals I leave, of course,
to that department and the NSA. The letter of 14 January 2008 from the
Archives Department of the NSA of the Baha’is of Canada stipulated
three general categories of material. In the statement “Managing
Archives,” in its first paragraph it was emphasized that: “archives are
natural bi-products of action not self-conscious documents put together
for the purpose of transmitting information to posterity.” The Archives
Department may see my journals in this latter context and, if so, I will
understand their decision to regard these journals as not purely archival
material. Given that this statement is written for LSAs, it may be that my
journals are, therefore, more relevant for a national archive. I left this
decision to the NBAA.
B.1 Journals or Diaries:
Preamble:
What follows is a summary of my journals or diaries, for I use the terms
interchangeably even though I am aware that fine distinctions are made
by specialists in the field of diary and journal-making, themselves sub-
sections of life-writing, life-narrative, autobiography and memoir writing.
These journals are not those of an artist with paint, a sculptor with clay,
but one of an artist in the medium of words. This summary is made after
25 years of diary/journal keeping, January 1984 to January 2009. Those
who work in the more familiar art mediums of painting and sculpture,
pottery or one of the various forms of design, may find my post useful,
3

such is my hope. As I have said before in other contexts than this,
keeping a journal/diary I have found difficult. I know many others do as
well, artists and people in all sorts of walks of life. The Australian artist
Donald Friend's work with his art journal has been helpful to me in this
vein, in the vein of keeping and maintaining a diary. Also of value to me
have been the diaries of Juliet Thompson, Agnes Parsons and a range of
other diaries and quasi-memoiristic resources that have appeared online
in recent years.7
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 5 OF MY DIARY
After twenty-five years of haphazard diary keeping(1984-2009)8
and an
equally haphazard twenty-three years of dream recording(1986-2009)9
,
there looms ahead of me the shadow of a type of diary that my work may
attain to: part of the shadow is prospective and the other retrospective.
What, indeed, will I make of this loose, drifting material of my life, as
Virginia Woolf calls the material in her diary and which very accurately
describes mine, however incomplete, however irregular are my entries,
however superficial the content often is. Do I want this diary to be so
elastic as to embrace anything solemn, slight, beautiful or ugly that comes
to mind, sort of a capacious hold-all? Will this diary, this journal, this
particular way of conveying my memoir, when all is said and done and
the roll is called up yonder, assuming there is a roll and there is an up-
yonder where diaries play any part at all—will this diaristic memoir
resemble a place where I have flung a mass of odds and ends, some with
reflective ardour and great meaning, some with fatigue and sadness, some
with guilt and shame, some with a sense of their utter triviality, their
tedium and life's?
The purpose of this overview of my diary, updated exactly twenty-five
years after making episodic entries and introducing, as it does, the 5th
volume of this diary, is to analyse, give definition and pattern to the
autobiographical memory that I have put on paper across my lifespan in
the form of diary.10
I use other genres of writing to record memory, but I
7
The Barber’s Diaries, Irene Lancaster's Diary, The Story of My Heart
by Ali Furutan among other diaristic, memoiristic and autobiographical
resources.
8
19 January 1984 to 19 January 2009
2
See my Journal, Volume 3.1.
9
10
Johannes J.F. Schroots and Cor van Dijkum, “Autobiographical
Memory Bump: A Dynamic Lifespan Model,” Dynamic Psychology: An
International, Interdisciplinary Journal of Complex Mental
4

deal here with the genre of journal or diary. Autobiographical memory,
in so far as it relates to my journal, can be broadly defined as a type of
episodic memory for information related to the self, both in the form of
retrospective and prospective memories, as well as aims, goals and
expectations. If this retrospective, episodic account relates to the retrieval
in the present of memories, experiences or past events, then prospective
autobiographical memory is concerned with the retrieval of expectations,
anticipations or future events which likewise are connected in some way
with the present.
On the basis of what I have written here in these 25 years, it would appear
that a collection of flotsam and jetsam, as Woolf says, has been put on
record. This material has been born from a vaster collection of life's
flotsam and jetsam, some of which is meaningful to me in the moment or
at least hopefully so but, ultimately and possibly, about as useful and
valuable to others as the eye of a dead ant. I hope this is not the case but,
as T.S. Eliot once wrote, one has to be prepared that all which one has
written may become a dead letter. I get a sense of order in putting all this
on paper. That is its own intrinsic reward. I am sure this is the case for
many, artists and others.
Suzette Henke describes how many diarists come to their diaries out of
shattered lives, out of a need to relive their lives in terms of some dream,
some myth, some endless story which they compose.11
This is not the
case with me but, as my fifties wore on and turned into my sixties, I
seemed to wear on if not out. I did not burn-out but my wings had been
clipped and my edges were frayed. I seemed to lose some of life’s heat
and there was some shattering. It was a shattering of the social nature I
had manifested for several decades, indeed as far back as I could
remember, perhaps as far back as my first memories 60 years ago. It is
difficult to define just what it is that lies under this diary, what is its
raison d’etre or what are its raisons d’etres. One of the leitmotifs which
binds the diary together into a coherent whole, if indeed it has coherence
and wholeness, is my life as a pioneer and travel teacher.
There are many things that motivate me to want to add an extra level to
an already present story, my autobiography or memoir,12
was conveyed
Processes, 2004.
11
Suzette Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in
Women’s Life Writing, St. Martin’s, NY, 1999, pp.56-7.
12
My autobiography entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs is 2600
pages and in 5 volumes. These five volumes are currently being
5

by Shakespeare in sonnet 94: “For sweetest things turn sourest by their
deeds.”13
My diary or journal is much more confessional than my
autobiography or memoir. My pioneering story needed to be written, or
such was my own felt need. It has now been written; it is now complete
as far as the 6th
edition and a truncated version of it can be found at
Baha’i Library Online. Baha’is are advised, though, not be confess their
sins unless, of course, they spontaneously desire to do so and in this
regard they are quite free. My journal is much more confessional.
By the age of fifty I had certainly collected lots of deeds whose memories
were not endearing. Perhaps by means of memoir, autobiography, poetry
and diary I was trying to work some magic to reflect the self I wanted to
be. Such was the case with that famous diarist Anais Nin. I don’t think it
was the case with me, though there was some of Anais Nin’s aim in my
own. My diary or journal tended to be the place of my most confessional
writing and, for that reason alone if for no other, it deserved to exist on its
own. It was and is a genre of particular use to me as a writer for its
several purposes which this brief essay attempts to outline.
As this diary has developed over a quarter of a century, it has served
simply to help me to describe my life, not especially to deal with
accounts of personal complexities like the desire to fight or flight, nor to
battle on, nor adopt some defensive escape, nor as a strategy to cope with
traumatic personal history, although I have often experienced all of these
inner wantings to escape, to battle on or deal with trauma of different
kinds. To want to cut and run and great inner fear or anxiety of some
kind were common enough occurrences in my more than six decades of
living thusfar. For I was, in part at least, the traumatized soul that Phyllis
K. Peterson describes in her book Assisting the Traumatized Soul.14
It
was Baha’u’llah though, not Shakespeare, who I think put his finger on
the reason for the shift in my life activity as my fifties wore on and
became incrementally my sixties. Excess of speech is a deadly poison and
its affects last a lifetime, the Founder of the Baha’i Faith wrote in the 19th
century. I had had an excess of life’s verbal art and its twistings and
turnings in the 60 years of my memoried life: 1947/8-2007/8. Of course,
there is much more in the motivational matrix that led to the writing of
this diary and I deal with this complex matrix as far as I am able and as
reviewed by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the Untied
States of America.
13
Shakespeare, Sonnets, No.94.
14
Phyllis K.Peterson, Assisting the Traumatized Soul, BPT, Wilmette,
1999.
6

much as I desire in this introduction to Volume 5 of this diary and at
other places in my writings for those who are interested in following-up
on this theme, the raison d’etre for this diary.
I did not desire to take part in that conversational/verbal part of life as my
late adulthood(60-80), grew insensibly and incrementally, annalistically
as the Romans would have written it, into their middle years, 65 to 75.
As the year 1984-1985 opened and I began this diary at the age of forty,
more than 30 years after my association with the Baha’i Faith began and
more than 20 years after my pioneering life had begun in Canada. I
found myself in possession of a talent, a gift, perhaps an unmerited grace.
I had been conscious of its developing nature since, perhaps 1972, my
first year as a high school teacher. In 1984 I was writing a column in the
Katherine’s local newspaper15
of 800 words every week. I won’t deal
with the origins of this writing activity in the local paper nor the
development by sensible and insensible degrees in the dozen years before
1984 going back to 1971 when I arrived as an international pioneer from
Canada to Whyalla in South Australia. I had always liked the base, the
origin, of art, in unmerited grace, as the unofficial poet laureate of the
Baha’i Faith back in the 1980s, sometimes emphasized. Annie Dollard
used this uplifting phrase or idea, although the question it deals with is far
from simple. Writing had been a talent which had grown slowly with the
years, first as a student, then as a teacher, then as a writer in publications
of various kinds. It was in the sheer exercise of this gift and harnessing it
to life's service and the causes that concerned me that was part of the
motivating base for producing a diary, although much more could be said
here and interested readers can find more of my comments on this theme
in my other writings.
My diary became, in part, a textual testimony, a form of scriptotherapy, a
testimonial, an episodic narrative, a form of defence and assertion, albeit
partial and temporary. It became, along with the other genres of my
writing, a form of living, a way of spending my time, my life, the way I
wanted to. I could make some comparisons and contrasts of my work
with the work of others. I found the diaries of others provided helpful
perspectives on my own writing, but I will not deal with this subject here
for the literature on diaries and journals is now burgeoning. And all of
this dairy writing was not therapy.
15
The Katherine Advertiser, Katherine, Northern Territory, Australia.
7

These five volumes of my journal are found in eight two-ring binders and
two arch-lever files. Three of these binders contain photographs with
some commentary and one of the files contains comments on some of my
dreams. I have made a periodic attempt to write a retrospective diary for
the years 1844 to 1984, but thus far the attempt has had limited success.
I don’t want to leave the impression that diary writing is a fertile field.
Far from it—for me. Much of my efforts at a diary are now and have
been for many years dry, uninspiring, far from encouraging.
Henry David Thoreau's fine Journal, kept from 1839 to 1861, gave
expression to Thoreau’s view, his vision of the destiny of America in
terms of life in death. That became a dominant feature of my writing as
far back as the 1980s, the feature of life in death. I am confident that
will be a strong part of the experience of many generations of the North
American pioneer-the Baha’i pioneer that is. There are times in this
account when I focus on the inner self, my experiences, my community;
there are other times when I focus on my society, the land, a more open
perspective. I seem to be a more tolerant person than Thoreau, although I
confess that by the time I retired at 55 I had begun to tire of people and
conversations about the ordinarily ordinary. Like Thoreau, I rarely have
the public in mind when I write, although I do have a future public in
mind as the Australian artist Donald Friend did in his diary.
In the last century over one billion deaths have occurred from trauma of
different kinds or so some historians claim, and so it is not surprising that
an individual diary should be seen in terms of life in death. But readers
will have to wait for my demise to read more on this theme. I only want
to allude to it here. Henry Miller arguably the first writer to use the “F”
word long before it broke out in the media in the 1960s, was one of the
few post-WW2 American writers of note who wrote praiseworthy things
about many of the things I hold dear, especially the Baha’i Faith. He also
wrote, somewhat prophetically:
"When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is
complete," wrote Miller, "another set of destruction will set in. And it
will be far more drastic, far more terrible than the destruction which we
are now witnessing. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution.
And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world
crumble."16
Not a happy note to include in the introduction to a volume of
my journal, but certainly interesting and written back in the early 1940s!
16
Geoffrey Nash, The Pheonix and the Ashes, George Ronald, Oxford,
1984, p.55.
8

Decades ago people would have trouble comprehending Miller's idea
here, but not anymore.
In the case of some of my retrospective diary work making entries is
difficult. For, when I write about events taking place forty years ago, I
cannot rely on closeness to the event. I must rely on what Peter Braustein
calls possessive memory. “Possessive memory,” writes Braustein in his
history of the counter-culture, “leaves the person and his memories in a
lover’s embrace. The person is in possession of his memories, and no one
else can touch them; at the same time, his memories are in possession of
him.” Braustein applies this idea to those activists in the sixties who
experienced “a sense of self-generation so powerful that it became a
constitutive part of their later identity.” Without going into the many
contradictory views that have emerged in sixties studies, there is little
doubt that I experienced several early stages of my own variety of
activism in the sixties. I was 15 when the sixties started and 25 when
they finished. My adult life began during those years and that “sense of
self-generation” is still a part of my identity even now. If it wasn't I don't
think I could keep writing. Like many of the sixties generation, I felt as if
I was an agent of history and I still do.17
In writing my life story in the last years of my fifties and now early
sixties, I came to realize more than I ever had before, perhaps for the first
time in any full sense, that the success I had achieved in life grew not
only from my own hard work and certain favourable circumstances of my
environment, but from the foundation provided by my parents and my
grandparents on my mother’s side. The journey of understanding, like
the journey of life itself, is an emotional one that I have tried to write
about with honesty and with a fresh eye for those primary relationships in
my life: father-son, mother-son and grandfather-grandson, wife-husband,
among several others I could possibly include.18
Of course, not all is
emotion, again thank goodness. There is intellect, reason, the cultural
attainments of the mind and a host of other qualities that psychologists
enumerate in their studies of personality and that historians describe in
their study of the past.
17
Rick Perlstein, “Who Owns the Sixties?” Lingua Franca, Vol.6, No.4,
1996.
18
With thanks to Jim Huber, A Thousand Goodbyes: A Son’s
Reflection on Living, Dying and the Things That Matter Most,
Thomas Nelson, 2001.
9

I still do not feel I have found the flow, the filling up of the springs, the
raising to higher levels of the streams of thought that could make of this
journal a document worth preserving for future generations. Perhaps I
will find that flow in the second 25 years of my journal writing. The
accumulating grist of my life has really yet to be ground and made into a
fertile soil for literary productivity in the first 25 years of writing this
journal. They may, in fact, never get ground properly. Thusfar, poetry
and narrative, essays and notes have stolen most of the material. They
have taken the literary stage of my life and left this diary-prose always
waiting in the wings. But, as I said above, the confessional element here
may attract a future reader whose interest is, not so much prurient, as
passionate and in possession of a solemn consciousness, a wellspring of
celebratory joy. There is some material here to satisfy to some extent
those prurient interests, but the wellspring of my celebratory joy, rooted
as it has become in my solemn consciousness, offers to future readers a
type of confessionalism that is moderate and intoxicated by the wine of
another cup. These intoxications I leave to readers of this diary should it
ever be published.
This Journal does have less concern for form than my poetry and for that
reason there is potentially an easier flow, once the flow begins, at least a
flow in a different direction to other genres I use for my writing. I have
mentioned before that Henry David Thoreau has been invaluable in
helping my diary writing, but I still await that flow in this diary, a flow
that has come to my 6500 poems upstream somewhere, but not here
downstream in this diary. This diary seems to meander downstream in
one of those u-shaped bows one reads about in geography books. The
flow so often stops as if one of the Australian droughts finally took away
all its water, all the water of life. In Thoreau's last years, from the late
1850s to his death in 1862, he wrote with energy and control, but with
little interest in getting into print. I hope this becomes true for my
Journal, a repository of lots of energy and creativity with no eye on
posterity, in my own latter years, ones that I cannot yet anticipate caught
up as I am in getting through today.
There is a type of unity in death, thought Thoreau. We need to learn how
to die in order to learn how to live was his view. Part of this process, as
far as my Journal is concerned, is the pleasure of serendipity. The only
thing we leave behind, Thoreau thought, was ourselves. This Journal is
just that: myself. It is as if one wants one’s leaves to survive, one’s
autumnal hints and the reds, browns and golds of autumn before winter
comes and takes it all away. In my case I often feel as if winter has come
to my Journal and no leaves can be found on its branches. Life is
10

sometimes cold and dry. This is certainly the case if I measure my life by
my Journal. Although there is an intoxication of joy in these journals
there is also the dry wretch, despair, disappointment and a personal sense
of loss. But there are other indices of measurement that readers may use
for these journals, if these journals ever see the light of day after my
passing—and thank goodness for these more moderate measurements of
journalistic-diaristic value.
Thoreau said that Emerson was more familiar with his work than he was.
I’m sure that, should this material ever be published, there will be those
who become more familiar with it--and perhaps with me--than I. I lose
touch with this Journal as one often does with aspects of one’s life: with
those one loves, with one's feelings which also seem to dry up especially
in areas which were once rich, wet and alive. Perhaps this is a way to
develop friends in the next life and be ready to meet them when they, or
rather I, arrive. I follow this theme too in my journals. Thoreau said that
the best growth in trees is in their old age, with harmony and regularity.
He also said good deeds act as an encouragement to yourself, to your
artistic pursuits, your writing. May I build up a niche of good deeds and
may my tree grow best in the years ahead.
Diaries can track the contemporaneous flow of public and private events.
They are not given all of a piece, all at once as in a book, such as a life
history might be. But rather, they are written discontinuously, either
daily or over longer intervals of time and as such provide a record of an
ever-changing present. Other types of autobiographical texts or life
documents such as letters, rather than documenting the present, tend
towards making retrospective sense of a whole life or towards retelling
significant moments, epiphanies or crystallizations of experience. This
proximity to the present, the closeness between the experience and the
record of experience means that there is the perception at least that diaries
are less subject to the vagaries of memory, to retrospective censorship or
reframing than other autobiographical accounts.19
Still, there are in my
letters much that others might place in a diary and so it is that my letters
and diary might be seen as all of one piece.
I certainly think there is a variety of potential historical value in these
folders that contain my Journals or Diaries and the unfolding aspects of
my life. It is a potential I have hardly begun to realize as yet in these first
five diary-volumes. There is, I like to think, something unique, some
19
H. Elliott, “The Use of Diaries in Sociological Research on Health
Experience,” Sociological Research Online, V.2, No.2, 1997.
11

unique contribution to my overall autobiographical opus: Pioneering
Over Four Epochs, that has begun to reveal itself after twenty-five years
of making entries.
A description of "a life without secrets and without privacy" wrote the
great Russian poet Boris Pasternak, describing as he did the life that was
his and on display in society in its different forms like some "show
window" is simply "inconceivable," he concluded. For me, this privacy is
essentially the life of the mind and many things I have not revealed in the
other forms of autobiography. But the revelation, this inner life, comes in
my journal. This inner life includes aspects of personal life that one
might term revelations: those elements of human experience that seem
most private, most hidden, most personal, most shameful, most
embarrassing, a source of most guilt and those things that do not tend to
be divulged in the normal course of interpersonal life. They are revealed
episodically in these journals when time and the inclination have
combined to allow me to record them in written form. They are often that
sort of entry that has concerned many a writer and artist and which these
artists and writers have wanted to burn either before or after their demise
from this mortal coil. But, as I said above, there is in my journal what
might be called an affective spectrum of experience with emotions and
activity at the other end of the continuum: joy, ecstasy, fervid love,
rapture, intense desire, inter alia.
I have tried to eliminate the trivial from what I write, but this is difficult
for so much of life necessarily deals with triviality’s many particularities
and their ephemerality. When one tries to put one's experience on paper
the trivial seems to abound in detail and this is one reason among many
why most people never keep a journal. The mere contemplation of the
exercise of writing down what one does is more than the average person
can bear; indeed, the activity amounts to an inner revulsion, for many
reasons. It is just too tedious for words, both the process and the content.
And this is not just due to the average person’s distaste for writing. But
enough on this sad but complex theme in this introductory statement.
I have no intention of writing in public places like this about all the
boredom and the chowder, as the famous singer and songwriter Paul
Simon calls some of the aspects of life; nor do I intend to write about all
of my sins of omission and commission, all the points of shame and guilt
that rise up from my life like a forest of trees. But many of them I do
write about in my Diary. Whether I deserve to have had these
experiences, whether they came to me as a result of destiny,
circumstance, capricious passion, whether I can even grasp the causative
12

factors that gave rise to them at all or whether I can’t, I am not a believer
in the virtues of public confession, beyond a certain point. There are
times for public confession, public to some degree, for the spontaneous
acknowledgment of wrongs I have committed or faults in my character.
There are times when I would like someone, usually a close companion
of some sort, to forgive me or accept me even with my faults. That point
or points tends to be, for me at least, when I admit to personal struggle
and battle in the hope that my admission may help others with their battle
and struggle. Those who are keen to read the more confessional
intimacies of my life and in more detail than they will find in my other
published writings, introductions to various genres and in many other
places in my oeuvre, can read about them in the posthumous collection of
my Journals, should my executors decide they are relevant and helpful to
a public audience.
Readers who have followed the series of introductions to my several
volumes of journals will by now realise that much of what is written here
in this introduction is virtually the same as the introduction to volume 4
of my journal. I have also written many of these words both before and
after officially opening this volume 5 of my journal three years ago on
January 20th
2006. It seemed useful to begin the contemplation of the 5th
volume of this diary before that opening date of January 20th 2006.
Volume 4 was becoming too full to continue using that 2-ring binder. The
size of my volumes, the extent of the entries, is based on the room in each
arch-lever file or two-ring binder for the entries I place.
It is now nearly 37 years ago that I arrived in Australia as an international
pioneer(12/7/71) from Canada. After 36 months(20/1/06 to 1/6/09) now
of making entries in this Volume 5 of my Journal, I conclude this
introduction and leave the processes of making further entries and writing
more complete introductions to those mysterious dispensations of a
Watchful Providence. If Providence is not that watchful in my personal
direction and if that Providence has other things to do than to be
concerned with the intimacies of my life on a daily basis, I can at least
recount the tokens that tell of the glorious handiwork of the universe in
which I am an infinitesimal part and some of the fiery, painful aspects of
its immensity. Finally, I leave to reason and virtue their steady and not
so uniform course while the extravagant wanderings of my vice and folly
continue their path down destiny’s corridors with my free will giving me
opportunities of wonder and delight and closing other doors of possibility
as I travel. As this awful, awkward and tangled scene in what is perhaps
history's greatest climacteric plays itself out before my eyes in these
epochs of my pioneering life, I conclude this introduction to my Diary
13

Volume 5. And I leave it to the Archives Department and the NSA of the
Baha’is of Canada to decide whether this diary that is discussed here
would be a useful addition to the National Baha’i Archive of Canada.
-Ron Price, 20 January 2009.
------------------------
And now to the second category of “individual papers”--“original
correspondence,” as mentioned in the letter of 14 January 2008 from the
Archives Department of the NSA of the Baha’is of Canada. The first
category of “individual papers” that I discussed above was “journals.” I
turn now to letters. Whether my letters show the development of the
Baha’i community in Canada or Australia as mentioned as the defining
feature for what the Archives Department look for in Journals I leave, of
course, to that department and the NSA. The letter of 14 January 2008
from the Archives Department of the NSA of the Baha’is of Canada
stipulated three general categories of material. In the statement
“Managing Archives,” in its first paragraph it was emphasized that:
“archives are natural bi-products of action not self-conscious documents
put together for the purpose of transmitting information to posterity.” The
Archives Department may see my letters in this latter context and, if so, I
will understand their decision to regard these journals as not purely
archival material. Given that this statement is written for LSAs, it may be
that my letters are, therefore, more relevant for a national archive. I leave
this decision, of course, as I mentioned above, to you.
B.2 Letters:
MASTER FILE TO MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS
Preamble:
The outline of the categories of my letters below is the one that presently
exists, that is, in January 2009. This outline tends to get altered from
time to time due to the changing nature of what is still a live collection of
letters. Very few of these letters are on the world wide web, perhaps as
many as six to a dozen--I’ve never counted--because these letters are
either personal, administrative or professional in some way or another. I
prefer to keep the great body of this material confidential until at least my
passing. At the present time there are 50 years of letters(1959-2009) in
the collection, the 50 years that I have been a member of the Baha’i
community. But very few of these letters come from the years before
1979; far less before 40 years ago in 1969 and none before 1959. These
letters are found in some 25 volumes under eleven major sections or
14

categoies with the headings as indicated. Since 2001 I have added
another section of letters, a 12th
--the email. That catefory is divided into
many sub-section in my computer directory. The email is a hybrid form
of letter or, perhaps, a replacement since the email has come to take the
place of letters in the last decade or so. This 12th
section now exists in an
additional 25 volumes and is not categorized below as is the first 25
volumes of letters in this master file.
Outline:
I. Personal Correspondence
1. Volume 1: 1967-1984
2. Volume 2: 1985-1988
3. Volume 3: 1989-1994
4. Volume 4: 1995-1996
5. Volume 5: 1997-1999
6. Volume 6: 1999-2001
7. Volume 7: 2002-2003
8. Volume 8: 2003-2004
9. Volume 9: 2004-2005
10. Volume 10: 2005-2006
11. Volume 11: 2006-2007
12. Volume 12: 2008-2009
II. Writing to/from Baha’i Institutions, Magazines/Journals,
Individuals
II.1 Baha'i World Centre, Universal House of Justice
II.2 National, Regional and Local Institutions
2.2.1 NSA of the Baha’is of Australia
2.2.2 Hands of the Cause
2.2.3 Continental Board of Counsellors/Auxiliary Boards
2.2.4 BROs, RTCs and Regional Councils
2.2.5 LSAs and Groups(Reg and Unreg)
2.2.6 National Committees of the NSA of Australia
2.2.7 Other NSAs
2.2.7.1 NSA of USA and Its Comittees
2.2.8 The George Town Baha’i Group
III.1 Contacts with Publishers, Magazines, Journals and Online Sites
Volumes 3.1 to 3.17
(over 4000)
15

III.2 International Institutions:
II.3.1 Office of Public Information
II.3.2 International Teaching Centre
II.3.3 Baha’i World Centre Library
II.3.4 Office of Economic and Social Development
II.3.5 Baha’i World Centre
IV Communications with Canada:
Volumes 4.1 to 4.3
V. Communications With Roger White: 1981-1992
VI. 1. Association for Baha’i Studies: Australia
2. Association for Baha’i Studies: Canada
3. Bill Washington
4. Judy Hassall
5. Writing Articles for Magazines:1980s.
6. Dialogue Magazine: Role as Arts and Culture Editor
VII.1 Baha'i History in WA and the NT
Vol.1-3 Letters, Essays and Notes: Vols. 1-4
(sent to the Regional Council of the NT)
VIII Additional/Particular Individuals
1. Antoinette Edmonds
2. Graham Hassall
3. Gary Olson
IX. Correspondence In Relation to Writing Novels/Essays
1. From 1987 to 1991(see Unpublished Writings Vol.3 File No1)
X. Correspondence in Relation to Job Hunting
1. Some letters and material for the Years 1961 to 2001
XI. Some Special Correspondence:
1. annual emails/letters
16

I have written introductions to all of these volumes and some of them are
at Baha’i Library-Online in the Personal Letters Section. The first
edition/draft of the above outline was made at about the time of the
opening of the Terraces in the autumn or winter of 2001 as I was about to
enter the 40th
year of my pioneering life. That draft has been revised
several times since. -20/1/09
This collection of letters, what has become by degrees a voluminous
epistolarium, comes from my Bahai life, 1959 to 2009, from my years as
an adolescent and then as an adult at the early, middle and late stages of
that part of human development as the psychologists call them. Now, into
the early years of the evening of my life, the early years(60-65) of late
adulthood(60-80), I post this reflection on a lifetime of writing letters
within the context of my society, my Bahai life and especially my
pioneering life. Although I have not been able to locate any letters before
1962, before my pioneering life began, the first letter I recall writing was
in 1959, some 50 years ago, to a fellow Bahai in Japan.
In addition to the 5000 letters, there are 5000 emails and internet posts. I
have not kept the internet posts. They are scattered throughout the world-
wide-web and, in many cases, will be untraceable. Virtually this entire
body of epistolary material was written during the dark heart of an age of
transition, an age which was my life, perhaps the darkest in history.
This collection of 10,000 items including those hybrid forms of letter--the
email and internet post--which emerged as a new millennium was
opening are written by and to a homefront(1962-1971) and then an
international pioneer(1971-2009). They are communications written to: a
friend, a colleague, a fellow Bahai, a person or persons at one of 1000s of
sites on the internet, a Bahai institution at the local, national or global
level, one of a multitude of other organizations, a family member and
some association or other. Readers will find here in this outline mainly
general commentaries on my letters and letters as a genre, prose-poems
on letters, mine and those of others in history and literature. Except for
the occasional letter the body of my correspondence is not included here.
Another 10,000 letters and assorted items of correspondence were written
in connection with my employment from the early 1960s to the early
years of the new millennium, but virtually none of them were kept. The
number of emails received in the first two decades of email
correspondence(1989-2009) was beyond counting, but 99% of it was
deleted. The small number of emails that required a response in some
detail were kept as were the responses. On my demise some or all of this
collected correspondence that can be accessed may be published. We
17

shall see. I shall not see for I shall have gone to the land of those who
speak no more, as The Bab put it so succinctly. He might have added to
the land of those who write no more. Those mysterious dispensations of
Providence and my executors will determine what happens to this
lifelong collection of attempts to connect with the minds and hearts of
others by means of the traditional letter and its modern variants.
Note: beginning in August 2007 all correspondence of significance was
kept in my computer directory/files; the only hard copies kept were an
assortment of quasi-epistolary and literary material that did not seem to
have a logical place in my computer directory.
The thousands of letters and thousands of hours that this homefront and
international pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community has spent
writing letters, emails and internet posts in the last fifty years, 1959-2009,
I dedicate to the great letter writers in Bahai history. I dedicate these
hours and these communications to the Central Figures of this Faith,
Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice--individuals and
institutions that have produced a treasure house of correspondence.
Then there are the many whose names are on Bahai lists but who have
played little to no part in the Bahai community in their years of
membership; as well as the not-so nameless and traceless, each of whom
has their story and their varying degrees of writing and who, collectively,
have written what I have little doubt are literally billions of letters, emails
and written communications of an epistolary nature. To these I also
dedicate my collection of letters. If I also include in my dedication, the
massive quantities of correspondence that has been written by the
institutions of this Cause on the appointed and elected side of its
administrative structure; and the epistolary work of the two chief
precursors of this Faith, those two chief luminaries in the earliest history
of this emerging world religion, and those who also wrote letters in
responding to the seeds these precursors sowed and were involved in
different ways in the earliest days of the history of this new Faith as far
back as the time that Shaykh Ahmad left his home in N.E. Arabia in 1782
to 1792(circa)---the letters of this multitude to whom I dedicate my own
epistolary efforts might just reach to a distant star if they were laid side
by side!
Many, if not most, of the epistolary communications of more than two
centuries of Babi-Bahai history are now lost to historians and archivists.
Saving letters is not a popular sport and, some would argue, neither is
writing them. But, still, the epistolary paper trails of this newest of the
18

world’s great religious systems spread back, as is obvious, to well before
the French revolution in 1789 and these trails are significantly more than
just a trace. No other religion has placed so subtle and significant a value
on this method of exchange, writes Bahiyyih Nakhjvani in her book
Asking Questions.(George Ronald, Oxford, 1990, p.6.
At some future time, when the tempests we are living through in these
early decades and, perhaps, centuries of the Formative Age of this Faith,
an Age which began in Bahai history in 1921, are over and a relative
calm has been produced in the affairs of men, historians, archivists,
biographers and analysts of many a kind will possess a literary and
epistolary base of a magnitude undreamt of in any previous age for an
analysis of the times, the epochs of the first two centuries of this Bahai
Era(B.E. beginning in 1844) and the century of its precursors, 1744-1844.
My focus here is not on this wide and many-genred literary base,
however, it is on the letter and, more recently, the email and internet
postings of many kinds, kinds resembling the letter in many basic ways.
Letters give us a direct and spontaneous portrait of the individual and
they are also useful in providing an analytical resource for social and
institutional analysis. I could include here, diaries and journals since they
are letters, of a sort, letters to oneself, a book of thoughts to and by
oneself. But these genres, too, are not my focus in this review of my
letters and this form of communication that are part of the history of this
Cause.
As the poet and philosopher Emerson once said: My tongue is prone to
lose the way; not so my pen, for in a letter we surely put them better.
(Emerson, Manuscripts and Poems: 1860-1869) This pioneer, in a period
going back now fifty years, has often found that one way of doing
something for another was: to write a letter, since the mid-1990s send an
email and, since the late 1990s, post on the internet. Not endowed with
mechanical skills and proficencies with wood and metal; not particularly
interested in so many things in the popular culture like sport, gardening,
cooking, heavy doses of much of the content in the print and electronic
media; indeed, I could list many personal deficiencies and areas of
disinterest, I found the letter was one thing I could do and write and in the
process, perhaps, document some of my sensory perceptions of the
present age, perceptions that were relevant to the future of a religion
whose very bones spoke of a golden age for humankind which was
scarcely believable, but was worth working for and was at the basis of my
own philosophy of action in this earthly life. Hopefully my letters would
evince some precision and, perhaps, for a future age they would be of
value. I often wondered, though, how useful this interest, this skill, was in
19

its apparent single-mindedness for it was not, as a I say, a popular sport!
The exercise resulted, too, in a collection of many a dusty volume of
paper which, as T.S. Eliot once put it with some emphasis, may in the end
amount to an immense pile of stuff with absolutely no value or purpose.
There is, too, some doubt, some questionableness, as to whether anyone’s
letters should be taken as a reliable guide to biography and still less to
history. Letters often tell us more about postures that replace relationships
than about the relationships themselves. Sharon Cameron points this out
in her analysis of Emily Dickinson’s letters in her book: Lyric Time:
Dickinson and the Limits of Genre(Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1979,
p.p.11-12). Some writers of letters spring to an intimacy in their
correspondence that they do not possess in reality, in their day-to-day life.
I am one of those now in my sixties, for I am not particularly keen on
intimacy any more, at least outside of cyberspace. Life has given me
decades of it and I have grown tired after the many years of conversation
and the many degrees of intimacy that went with it. In letters I can spring
to an intimacy and then forget it in a moment. Such was the experience
and view of George Bernard Shaw, as voluminous a letter-writer as there
ever was. Shaw once said: a full life has to be cleared out every day by
the housemaid of forgetfulness or the air would become unbreathable.
Shaw went on to add that an empty life is peopled with the absent and the
imagined and the full life--well, I'll let you examine the life of Shaw and
draw your own conclusions to this somewhat complex question of what
constitutes a full life.(Frank Kermode, The Uses of Error, Collins,
London, 1990, p.253. I'm sure this quite provocative thought of Shaws is
partly true, especially in our age of radio, television and assorted media
that did not exist in Shaws time when the letter was, arguably, one of the
chief means of civilized discourse.
No matter how carefully crafted and arranged a letter is, of course, it is
harmless and valueless until it is activated by the decoding reader. This
was a remark by one Robert McClure in another analysis of Emily
Dickinsons letters(The Seductions of Emily Dickinson, p.61). I leave this
introduction at BARL, the following commentary and whatever letters I
have written that may be bequeathed to posterity to these future decoding
readers. I wish them well and I wish them a perceptiveness in order to
win, to attain, from the often grey, familiar and accustomed elements of
the quotidian in these letters, any glow, flare and light in these 5000
pieces of writing, written at a time which may well prove to be the
darkest hours in the history of civilization when a new Faith expanded
slowly, imperceptibly in some ways and emerged from an obscurity in
which it had long languished since its inception in the 19th century and
20

its earliest historical precedents in the mid-to-late 18th century. Over
these four epochs in which my own life and letters found their place in
history(1944-2021), as the first streaks of a Promised Dawn gradually
were chasing away that darkness; and as this Cause slowly became a
more familiar and respected feature on the international landscape, these
letters became, for me, an example of my attempt, however inadequate, to
proclaim the name and the message of Bahaullah.
These letters illustrate, and are part of, the struggle, the setbacks, the
discouragements over these same epochs and especially the years after
the unique victory that the Cause won in 1963 which has consolidated
itself(Century of Light, p.92) in further victories over more than four
decades(1963-2007), the period when virtually all these letters were
written. These various communications are also, from my point of view
anyway, part of the succession of triumphs that the Cause has witnessed
from its very inception. However exhausting and discouraging the
process has often been--and it has often been--I cannot fail to take deep
satisfaction on a number of fronts: one of these fronts is these letters and
the mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence that, for me if not
for others, are revealed therein.
My letters surprise me. If earnestness and sincerity could give them
immortality they would be immortal; sadly in letter-writing as in life
earnestness and sincerity, however dogged and plodding, are rarely
enough. If thirst for contact and intimacy could give them immortality
they would be immortal. Sadly, again, thirst is not always present and
intimacy is not always desired and even when they are present in letters,
these qualities are never enough as a basis for the longevity or the
popularity of a corpus of letters mixed as letters always are with a
quotidian reality that is enough to bore most human beings to death. The
boredom is sufficient to prevent nearly all readers from ever getting past a
brief examination of the cover of a book of such letters on library shelves.
If immortal they be, it will be due to their association with a Cause that is,
I believe, immortal. These letters will possess a conferred immortality,
conferred by association, as the Hebraic and the Greek traditions would
have expressed it each in their own historic and cultural contexts.
The American poet, Theodore Roethke, once said that an incoherent yet
sincere piece of writing often outlives the polished product. I'm not sure
how much this truth, if truth it be, applies to letters. Letters have enough
of a problem surviving and even more of a problem ever being read in
some fine collection usually made after a writer's death and, if one adds
inarticulateness to the recipe, the salt may just lose all of its savour.
21

The letters will float unread on some literary bath-water, back-water.
Letters, in some ways, possess the shapeless urges of the unconscious and
try to catch the movement of the mind of the writer amidst a practically
practical and a humanly human everydayness. They often remain, for
most readers, just that: shapeless and beyond the mind and the interest of
the general, the ordinary, reader. Often neither the recipient nor posterity
take any interest in the individual product or the entire epistolary
collection, as the case may be. Even when given a fine shape, as the
letters of Queen Victoria have been given, they come over time to catch
fewer and fewer people’s eyes. Still, her letters give ample testimony to
her character, her everyday life and the times. One does not write a letter
to increase ones popularity and if, as Eliot implies, one writes with one
eye on the future, when that future arrives one will be pulling up the
proverbial daisies.
Inventiveness and humour are two wonderful assets and, if they are
possessed by a letter writer, the letter can come alive. The letters of the
poet Roger White possessed these qualities and they had a narrative
momentum without which his letters would have grown static and
repetitive. Sadly, I have often felt that my letters expose the limits of my
literary, my epistolary and certainly my humorous sensibility. My letters
often grow limp, or so it seems to me, perhaps because I have often felt
limp; or they become crowded with quasi-mystical, quasi-intellectual,
abstractions as I have tried to deal with concepts that I only half
understand and ideas far beyond my philosophical and literary capacity to
put into words. In some of my earliest letters, letters to my first wife
which we used to call my love-letters, written in the early months of
1967, I fell back into an emulation of the Guardian's writings, hardly
appropriate Judy and I often felt later, when we read them on a quiet
Sunday afternoon, to express my feelings for her. Of course, the feelings
they expressed were ideological and intellectual and not aesthetic and
romantic. These letters were, in the end, thrown away.
Sometimes, especially in the first three decades of my letter writing, say,
1958 to 1988, a letter will contain a certain inwardness and at other times
I gamble with an intensity of emotional expression. And so, by the 1990s
and the turn of the millennium, I had gradually, insensibly, found a voice,
a balance, to put my emotions and thoughts into a form I was comfortable
with. Although I had been socialized in a literary milieux in my
childhood and adolescence(1944-1963) and emerged from that milieux in
the first years of my young adulthood(1965-1974), confidence in my
literary ability was slow in developing and did not really take on any
22

solid form and shape until I was 28(1972) and living in Whyalla South
Australia as an international pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community.
Confidence, though, is no guarantee of the ability to connect with a reader
or readers. I am sure some found my emails and letters far too long for
their tastes and interests. One advantage of a long letter I found was that I
was able to express an idea, even mention the Cause in some tangential
fashion. In a shorter letter this would not have been possible given the
social and cultural climate in which I was writing. Occasionally, someone
shocked me with their feedback, especially on the internet and I slowly
learned to package my words in small doses on most of the sites on the
WWW. Shock is often a useful antidote for some policy one is pursuing
or some behaviour one is exhibiting in letter writing or in other areas of
life.
Letter writing is a little like gambling; you have to stake a great deal,
everything it often seems, on one throw. Unlike gambling you often have
no idea whether you won or lost. But this is often the case in relationships
and in life: one cannot possibly evaluate what happens to our letters, to
our acts, to our lives--or anyone else’s--in terms of whether they will
result in justice, harm or benefit--since their fruition, ultimately, is
destined for another plane of existence. But, still, we do judge and we do
evaluate, as I do here in this lengthy analysis at the Bahai Academic
Resources Library Site.
Some 10,000(circa)letters were written in connection with job
applications, job inquiries and on the job responsibilities: 1960-2008. An
uncountable number of emails were received and sent in the years 1988-
2008 but, as I say above, 99% of them were deleted. Virtually none of the
communications from the job world were kept, except for a few in two
two-ring binders. Very few letters or items of literary memorabilia remain
from the years 1953 to 1967. Even if ninety-nine-hundredths of the
emails I received were sent to oblivion since 1988, a small but significant
body of this hybrid type of letter was kept in the two decades, 1988-2008.
One day all of the introductions I wrote to each of the many volumes of
my letters and emails, internet posts and replies and the several general
statements concerning my letters may be included in a collected letters
since half a century has been spent in my Bahai life and in the pioneering
process writing letters. For this first edition of The Letters of Ron Price:
1957/8-2007/8 on BARL the above outline and comment on the overall
layout and organization of my letters and emails that I have written and
received and thrown away and deleted will suffice.
23

There are three categories of my letters that one day may be found in the
event of my demise and in the event that such a search is desired:
1. extant letters or fragments of letters that I have written or received, in
public repositories or private collections including my own collection,
that have been examined in the original manuscript or typescript, in
photocopy or email;
2. published letters written or received for which no extant originals have
yet been located; and
3. unlocated letters for which varying types of evidence--photocopies,
emails and complete or partial typed transcriptions have been located.
The database of information for these three categories of letters, at this
stage far from complete, aims to contain the following fields or
information bases for each written and received item:(a ) year and date,
(b) addressee, (c)place and (d) original.
It is hoped that the terms: manuscript, typescript, postcard, photocopy,
typed copy, handwritten script, email or some combination of these terms
(for instance typed copy of handwritten script) will accompany each item.
Minimal descriptive information—fragment or mutilated—is provided
parenthetically where relevant.
The technicalities of presentation when complete are those of convention;
namely, (a) intrusions into the text are marked by square brackets; (b)
spelling and punctuation is to be silently corrected; (c) some mannerisms
are to be maintained; (d) dates are to be made uniform and (e) et cetera.
I have provided below some analysis and some illustration, some context
for whatever creativity is to be found by readers when and if this
collection is ever published. Letters are always, it seems to me,
exemplary illustrations of a writers creative capacity and the significance
of his epistolary skills. I do not claim that my letters are masterpieces of
the letter-writing art. If they disclose a personality that is well and good,
but the world has millions of personalities now disclosed for the public
eye, stories of individuals overcoming tribulation and achieving success.
Another such story is not required. And I have no intention nor do I wish
to make any claim to my life being a representative of that of an ideal
Baha’i or a Baha’i pioneer. This is not an account of an exemplum.
Claims to representativeness, it seems to me, are at best partial and at
worst highly misleading to those who might glean some context for
24

mentorship. I find there is something basically unstable or slippery about
experience or, to put it in even stronger terms, in the words of
Baha’u’llah, there is something about experience that bears only “the
mere semblance of reality.” There is something about it that is elusive,
even vain and empty, like “a vapour in the desert.”
There are so many exegetical and interpretive problems that accompany
efforts to tie down the meaning of a life, of an experience, of a
relationship. There is something divided, duplicitous, something that has
happened but has yet to be defined and described or, as is usually the
case, never described, at least not in writing, depending of course on the
experience of the person and their literary skills. There are innumerable
and indispensable points of reference in a life and yet so many of them
take on the feeling of a mirage, as if they are not really there, like a
dream, particularly as the years lengthen into later adulthood and old age.
Some of the disclosure that takes place in a selection of letters can make
the world better off, but this is not always the case and I certainly could
not guarantee a positive result for my disclosures here. For most people,
of course, the exercise, my disclosures, are totally irrelevant. If these
letters disclose something of the Bahai Faith, some new perspective over
these four epochs, I will feel that this amassing of correspondence has
been worthwhile.
These letters of mine are not so much examples of carefully crafted
writing as they are of unstudied informality, spontaneous indiscretions
and a certain cultivated civility. I like to think these letters possess a
wonderful chameleon-like quality for it is necessary that I reshape myself
for each correspondent. Each letter is a performance and an
impersonation. These letters contain many voices. On the occasions when
I send out form letters, at Christmas and Ayyam-i-Ha, this diversity and
variety is not achieved. For some respondents to my letters my reshaping
is not appreciated or enjoyed, indeed, no response was forthcoming at all
to many of my letters. As in the world of interpersonal interaction, of
verbal exchange, so in the world of letters: not every communication is
meaningful to both parties and, as in the world of the teacher that I was
for years, not every comment of mine was returned.
The next section of this somewhat long posting here at BARL comes
from chapter 3 of my memoirs. Not all of chapter 3 is included here, but
enough to give a taste and a critique of the letter-writing process from the
point of view of this Bahai who began his pioneering life 46 years ago in
1962 and who wrote his first letter to a Japanese Bahai youth in 1959--or
so I recall with some doubt as I write these words more than 50 years
25

later. It seems to me that those who read these letters one day, if they ever
do, will have difficulty grasping the nature of my personality inspite of,
or perhaps because of, the extensive literary base I have provided. The
only impeccable writers and the only personalities we feel we understand,
William Hazlitt noted nearly two centuries ago, are those who never write
and people we have only briefly met. I would add to Hazlitt's analysis
here that we often feel we understand a personality, but it is always in
part. Getting to know people is a bit of a mystery at the best of times
whether they are beside you on a bus, a train, a kitchen table or a bed.
One is always adjusting ones mask for correspondents and, in the process,
one creates a series of self-portraits, a mosaic of true and false, real and
unreal. The quality and maturity of my relationship with others is, as
William Hatcher pointed out 25 years ago, the best measure of spiritual
progress and growth, acquiring the capacity for such mature relationships
depends essentially on an intense inner life and self-development. And
the measure of ones spirituality depends on much else, too much else to
venture an analysis of in this brief statement. The letter is a reflection of
this inner life but, in the end, it is but a reflection of a spirituality which
lies at the centre of ones heart and soul.(William Hatcher, The Concept of
Spirituality, Bahai Studies, Vol.11, 1982, p.25.)
I assume that human personality is essentially unknowable, that it is the
revelation of a masquerade in a stage play--for all the worlds a stage. This
is not to say that there are not some aspects of life that are revealed
through letters, but readers must keep in mind that they are dealing with
fragmentary, often ambiguous and decidedly opaque material over which
they will be unable to wield any kind of imperial authority and
comprehension. Whatever insights they gain in readings, they will be
inevitably partial and will have a distinct tendency to crumble in a
epistolary world that is often obtuse, dull and vulnerable from or within
the onslaught of the quotidian. Collections of letters are not the most
favourite fare in the popular periodical press, journalistic studies and at
book launches except perhaps in the form of letters to the editor. They
exist, letters that is, in a somewhat secret, fenced off area of privacy, an
island of subjectivity, where even the external world is experienced as an
inner world. This, the sociologist George Simile once said, is the essence
of modernity.
Readers will find, too, that however much a letter reveals the springs of
action, there exists a nice and secret world to which he or she is never
privy. Oftentimes neither is the writer aware of his motivational matrix,
for mystery abounds in our worlds. The writer, namely myself in this
case, turns his letter like a historical microscope with some sensitivity
26

and with some attention to minute causality, but it is a causality he never
fully grasps and a sensitivity he only attains to partially. The road these
letters describe I'm not sure I would ever have entered (either the road of
the letters or the road of the analysis) if I had known of its length when I
wrote that first letter fifty years ago.
Performance struggles with ideal when one writes and when one lives.
That is the name of the game. My choice and my command of language,
to whatever degree of imperfection and perfection I attained, were the
fruit of exercise and with the arrival of more leisure in my mid-fifties that
exercise was able to find much fuller expression. Some of the facts of my
past, my religion and my society are presented in these letters in a
language that is rich in a type of coherence and a type of embedded
comment. I like to think that the cumulative effect of this comment is to
predispose readers in favour of a particular interpretation of reality and
the world. But my more sceptical self is more inclined to the view that a
collection of letters is not likely to change the world view of readers no
matter how open and receptive they may be. The stubborn testimony of
unexceptionable facts, the facts of my life, gradually bring me to the bar
of history and the sober discretion that I trust these same facts embody
are a statement about my present age and hour. At the bar there is no final
verdict only a series of temporary assessments and at the bar where
individuals read these letters there will be combinations of the non-event,
the boring, the occasional bright spark or low flame, perhaps a burning
sensation or two, a little indigestion, a wishing and a willing that is
beyond my pen to even attempt a description or a discretionary comment.
But no final judgement.
These letters present a divergent and unfussed, an unconnected and
bewildering mass of material. The collection is just too immense, the
expression too forcible, the factual matter too inescapable for my intellect
or the readers to close down any questions with definitiveness,
decisiveness and precision--with answers. Rather, it seems to me, these
letters open questions up and enlarge what is and was a narrow circle in
which nature has confined me. If complete answers are found they simply
carry the seeds of more questions. As the years went on, too, my thoughts
became more complicated and, although my perspective could be said to
remain the same, it was within such a different context that my letters
came to be written. From the late fifties and early 1960s, to the years as
they passed over the decades, my letters might as well have been written
by a different person. The questions I dealt with changed from decade to
decade, person to person and my inclusion of the responses to my letters
provides a thorough contextualization not so much to my influence, an
27

entity which is difficult to measure at best and at worst quite irrelevant to
my reasons for including them, but to the letters themselves and the
backdrop they provide to a period over several epochs of various urgent
and interlocking challenges, painstaking and frustrating individual and
community work when the Bahá'í Faith increased by 30 times, from 200
thousand in 1953 to six million in 2009.
Writing often draws attention to itself. This is especially true of letters
where attention often does not pass through to the subject but gets stuck
on the personality of the writer. For ours is an age, par excellence, of the
celebrity. The awkward and tangled reality of the past, though, is
displayed for all to see from my perspective in these letters. The surface
of my past gazes out upon history, from my letters with all their quotidian
dryness, everydayness, tedium and boredom. The past seems to elude the
net of language as that language gets caught up in minutiae, in the tedious
and the toilsome. And anything called certainty is endlessly deferred,
although there are pockets of certainty enough to go on and give us a
feeling that the sky will not fall down. At least not in my time.
I think there is little doubt that these four epochs are the scene for the
greatest and most aweful period in the history of humankind. Gibbon
once said this of Rome in the 2nd century AD. My account here of the
immensity and wonder of this period is an account from a quite personal
and limited perspective. It is an account, too, which renders my version of
a vision and my interpretation of a plot and script that derives from two
god-men in the 19th century. My letters are pregnant with delightful
observations that are as deep and as shallow as the person I am and they
are pregnant as well with the most trivial images and thoughts as watery
and limpid as amniotic fluid. For my letters, like the letters of most
others, contain what is often called telephone talk, talk which nullifies
serious artistic or psychological exchange, talk about lifes simplicities,
talk about lifes conventionalities like the weather and the events of daily
life.
Readers may find my letters something like the way that Carlyle found
Scotts letters. They are never without interest, he pointed out, yet they are
seldom or never very interesting. Id like to think that my letters might
impart something of my soul, my joys and anxieties, and something that
may engage the sympathies and pleasures of those who happen upon
them in their journey. In an age in which communication has become
more audible, with animated and electronic emails and sound systems
improving in quality decade by decade, it seems that communication has
also become more, or at least often, ephemeral; with billions of emails
28

biting the electronic dust each week, if not each day, I offer this
collection of letters as one mans record of his age.
I should say something about self-deception, since there is in letter-
writing an inherent straying away from what actually happens, however
slightly or innocently, a quiet but discernible progression from fact to
fiction. Self-deception, lying, secrecy, forgetfulness, confusion, gaps:
they are all part of the story and our processing of the story. Everything
we communicate, some analysts argue, is an orientation towards what is
secret without ever telling the secret. As Henry Miller puts it: “I am I and
I have thought unspeakable thoughts and done unthinkable things.” One
aim in writing letters is to aim for artistic coherence and ethical
satisfaction as we attempt to integrate, analyse and identify one of the
countless versions, todays, this moments and hours part of our story and
its inevitable secrets. This is unending work-poetic work-and it is central
to self-creation. In other ways the self-deception is accidental, incidental.
As Yeats put it: “I have changed nothing to my knowledge; and yet it
must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge; for I am
writing after many years and have consulted neither friend, nor letter, nor
old newspaper.”
There were three men went down the road
As down the road went he:
The man he was,
The man folks saw,
The man he wished to be.
-Source Unknown
Our ultimate aloneness in the universe is a truth which some find
frightening. This aloneness is a part of the core experience in writing
letters, autobiography or anything else. It is part of our very raison d’etre.
It may just be that one of the best routes to self-forgetfulness, which
‘Abdu’l-Baha says is at the heart of self-realization, is through self-
understanding on the road travelled by means of writing letters among
other forms of activity. I have drawn on the following three sources for
some of the above.
(1) Henry Miller in “Confessions and Autobiography” Autobiography:
Essays Theoretical and Critical, editor, James Olney, Princeton, 1980,
p.122.
29

(2) James Olney, “Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios:
The Ontology of Autobiography”, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical
and Critical, editor, James Olney, Princeton UP, 1980, p.262.
(3) Quoted in The Stories We are: An Essay on Self-Creation, William
Lowell Randall, University of Toronto, 1995, p.345.
_____________
SERENDIPITOUS LETTER WRITING AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
We all grow old and live in a matrix of groups, networks, institutions and
communities. These are part of the core substance of the letter, although
even the student of the epistolary genre can be guilty of serious omissions
and patterned distortions when he or she writes his or her letter. The
introspector and retrospector in letter writing can give us rare access to
inner experience from their position of aloof detachment and passionate
engagement. Monopolistic access to my own inner life has found many
grooves and at least one or two of those patterned distortions away from
letter writing and toward religion. I hope the time has not yet come, as
Virginia Woolf said can come, when I may have forgotten far more of
significance than I can remember. Certainly I am far from the position
Heinrich Boll was in when he wrote that “not one title, not one author,
not one book that I held in my hand has remained in my memory.”
The letter is both the ultimate Insider and the ultimate Outsider in
applying scientific understanding and insight to the self, the interplay of
sequences of status-sets, roll-sets and intellectual development. What
results is not so much a condensed description than a step toward
elucidation.1 I feel as if I have just made a start in the first two decades of
my attempt at an analytical discussion of the letter and my letters in
particular. After five decades of dipping in and out of letter writing I
don’t think I was at all conscious of letter writings hermeneutic influence
until at least the late 1980s when the Arc Project had been officially
announced. If the letter appeared in my life it was accidentally,
serendipitously and hardly worth any analysis, but that began to change
as this Cause I have now been associated with for more than half a
century was finally emerging from the obscurity in which it had
languished for a century and a half.--Ron Price with thanks to
1Sociological Lives: Social Change and the Life Course, Vol.2, editor,
Matilda White Riley, Sage Publications, London, 1988.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: ANALYSIS YET AGAIN
30

I have provided a succinct narrative account of my life.1 It is
chronological; the factual material is ordered, sequential. But, clearly,
sharpness of detail, revealing anecdote, even suspense and analysis of
motivation are given with insight and style much more effectively in my
poetry. There is so much poetry now, some 6500 poems spread over at
least 2000 pages. This collected and compendious mass of material, if it
is ever to provide a basis for biography in the future, must be shaped,
interpreted, given perspective, dimension, a point of view. The narrative
that any biography possesses must be given life. It is like so many PhD
theses which transfer dry bones from one graveyard to another but lack
individuality and vitality.
Such a biographer, if he or she is ever to exist, must provide the creative,
the fertile, the suggestive and engendering fact, an imaginative, a
referential dimension. Such an analyst must enact a character, a place, a
time in history. He will do this through language, through imposing a
formal coherency on my material, although inevitably there will be
present the incurable illogicalities of life, as Robert Louis Stevenson
called the inconsistent, the unresolved paradoxes of life. He will give the
reader a portrait not an inventory. This is what any biographer must do. I
do this in my autobiographical poetry. I provide many pictures, many
moods, many sides. Details balloon; they repeat; they illuminate. I
discover things about my life, but I do not invent them. I have done little
discovery in writing this autobiography thusfar.
As Plutarch and Boswell, two of history's most famous biographers,
demonstrated: "anecdote rather than history teaches us more about the
subject."2 I see my narrative as the home of history and my poetry as a
source of rich anecdote. It was for this reason I turned to poetry as a
reservoir of autobiography; it seemed to teach, to convey, much more
than narrative. Claude Levi-Strauss helps us to understand why several
poems about one object, or person, provide more significance or meaning
than a narrative when he writes:
To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its
parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it...Being
smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable....it seems to us
qualitatively simplified.3
One can not know everything about anyone, even oneself. The mountain
of detail that one does know would sink a ship and would not enlighten
anyone. The task of achieving comprehensiveness not only is impossible,
it is irrelevant. But there are intelligible dimensions of one's life and it is
31

these dimensions that my poetry deals with best. Imagination is critical in
writing biography. Some writers see invention more important than
knowledge. Inevitably, there is an element of invention, of moving
beyond the factual, but my own preference is to use imagination in a
framework of factual experience, as far as possible. To read my poetry
should be to immerse oneself in the first several decades of Bahá'í
experience in what the Bahá'ís see as 'the tenth stage of history' and,
especially, that time when the spiritual and administrative centre on Mt.
Carmel received its richest, its definitive, elaboration and definition.
There are several unifying nodes of experience for my poetry, in addition
to the above. I have drawn them to the reader's attention from time to
time in the introductions to some of my poems.
From a Bahá'í perspective my poetry will undoubtedly possess a moral
appeal associated with overcoming hardship, a quality that characterized
most nineteenth century biography. But the moral framework, while
retaining a certain simplicity, is expressed in a portrait of complexity,
refinement, mystery, a slumbering world, my own idle fancies and vain
imaginings and the streaming utterance of a new Revelation.
Freud commented that biographers choose their subjects 'for personal
reasons of their own emotional life.' 3 I'm sure this is equally, if not more,
true of autobiographers. After criss-crossing Australia as an international
pioneer and teaching in the northernmost and southernmost places in
Canada-all of this over thirty-seven years, I have watched this emerging
world religion grow perhaps fifteen times. I have taught in schools for
over thirty years and feel a certain fatigue. I must write this poetry for the
same reason a foetus must gestate for nine months. I feel, with Rilke, a
great inner solitude and that my life and history is itself a beginning, for
me, for my religion and for the world. I want to suck the sweetness out of
everything and tell the story.
I sigh a deep-dark melancholy along with this sweetness, but keep it in as
far as I am able. I am lonely and attentive in this sadness. My poetry
gives expression to this process and to my destiny which comes from
within. My poetry is the story of what happens to me. For the most part
"life happens" and one must respond to the seemingly inevitability of it
all, although the question of freedom and determinism is really quite
complex. Reality, I record in my poetry, comes to me slowly, infinitely
slowly. My poetry records this process. My poetry is an expression of a
fruit that has been ripening within me: obscure, deep, mysterious. After
years it now comes out in a continuous preoccupation as if I have, at last,
found some hidden springs. It is as if I have been playing around the
32

edges, with trivia, with surface. Finally something real, true, is around
me. I stick to my work. I have a quiet confidence, a patience, a distance
from a work that always occupies me. And so I can record a deep record
of my time. I am preparing something both visible and invisible,
something fundamental. This part of it is called autobiography.
-------------------FOOTNOTES----------------------------------------------------
1 When this essay was written, the 2nd edition of my autobiography was
floundering in such a state that I was just about to give up writing it. An
80 page first edition was completed five years before this essay was
written and it felt highly unsatisfactory.
2 Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY,
1984, p.60.
3 idem
4 ibid., p.122.
-------------------------------------
AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
The discourse, the impulse, of autobiography and that of ethnography is
combined in autoethnography. Autoethnography is an alternative to a
tendentiously-characterized and conventional autobiography, on the one
hand, and to a exoticizing, native-silencing brand of anthropology, on the
other. Autoethnography is simply a form of self-narrative that places the
self within a social context. As an autobiographical revision of
ethnography it may aim at giving a personal accounting of the location of
the self by making the ethnographer the subject-object of observation. It
involves the ethnographic presentation of oneself as the subject which is
usually considered the ‘object’ of the ethnographer’s interview. The
standard model of the personal memoir, the autobiography, supports an
liberal-individualist ideology and tends to isolate the author-subject from
community.
Works by women and/or members of historically marginal or oppressed
groups often resist the hegemony of the individualist account and give
more weight to the social formation or inscription of selfhood and to the
ways in which the author-subject negotiates the terms of his or her
insertion into the identity-categories their culture imposes on them.
Where the representation of cultures is concerned, critics commend
autoethnography’s intricate interplay of the introspective personal
engagement expected of an autobiography and the self-effacement
expected of ethnography’s cultural descriptions. The impulse for self-
documentation and the reproduction of images of the self pervade our
everyday practice. The common business of social existence is the
33

occasion for endlessly resourceful and enlightened dramatizations of self.
We are each in our own way articulate exegetes of the politics of
selfhood.-Ron Price with thanks to James Buzard, “On Auto-
Ethnographic Authority,” The Yale Journal of Criticism,Volume 16,
Number 1, Spring 2003.
The above essays contain just some of the ideas that I came across in the
literature on autobiography. I have drawn on just some of the array of
writing which has appeared in autobiographical literature especially since
the decade 1950 to 1960. This literature has transformed our
understanding of autobiography. --5/5/05.
----------------------------------------------
PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS: MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
VOLUME ONE:
CHAPTER THREE: LETTERS
(Part of this Chapter)
The very texture of history.....
Perception, reflection and social interaction are at least three of the many
psychologically diverse contexts in which the word self appears in our
everyday discourse. Autobiography is an important part of the narration
of this self and this autobiography, like all autobiographies, finds its
home in all of these contexts.1 But since the reality of man is his thought
and what endures, after life has completed its course, is the soul, it is
hardly surprising that there is a curious intangibility,2 an inherently
spiritual abstraction, associated with defining, with expressing, who we
are. And it is hardly surprising that this work of mine, this autobiography,
contains a great deal that is better described as thought and not so much
that one could describe as action. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jens
Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh, editors, Narrative and Identity:
Studies in Autobiography: Self and Culture, John Benjamins Publishing
Co., 2001; and 2Hannah Arendt in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and
Selfhood, Adriana Cavarero, Routledge, NY,2000, p.ix.
Although there is this curious intangibility that makes up any attempt to
describe who we are, men’s beliefs in the sphere of human conduct are
part of their conception of themselves and are intrinsic to their picture of
the world. Both these beliefs and this conduct can be found expressed
again and again in my letters.-Ron Price with thanks to Isaiah Berlin
34

quoted by Robert Matuozzi, “When Bad Things Happen to Other
People,” Philosophy & Literature, Vol.25,No.1, 2001, pp. 173-177.
On the dust jacket of The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust: 1880 to 1903
the publishers, Doubleday and Company, have written “letters are the
strongest indicators of personality, perhaps the purest form of
autobiography. We look at them as a means of knowing the author as a
human being, of gaining perspectives on his life and work and, perhaps,
divining the secret foundation of his creativity.” I think there is some
truth in this remark. There is also, from my own experience, some truth in
the sentiments of Thomas Wolfe who is quoted by Elizabeth Nowell in
her introduction to the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe “a writer writes
a letter in order to forget it.” Once down on paper, I find, the emotion or
experience loses its compulsive force and can be stored away and
forgotten. I have stored away some 5000 letters in over fifty volumes.
Since beginning to collect these letters in 1967(with some retrospective
findings and recollections going back to 1957) I have come to see them as
an autobiographical tool. I leave it to readers to assess just where this
autobiography is strongest and where it is weakest, where it is useful and
where it is irrelevant. This is difficult for me to assess.
If this autobiography works for readers, it will not be because I have
filled it with facts, with details, with the minutiae of life documented with
great enthusiasm and eagerness in letters to friends and a variety of
institutions. Success in this life narrative that has been going down on
paper over many a year will be due to its basis, its centeredness, in ideas,
the quality of the writing and this narratives connection with an emerging
world Faith. If it becomes a success, at least in the short terms, at least in
the next, say, several decades, as I have indicated before, in all likelihood
that success will still be one that resonates with only a few people. But
whether it resonates with many or a few, I believe, as Gilroy and
Verhoeven argue, these letters are marked by and sent to the world. They
counter, too, tendencies to flatten out the uniqueness of the individual in
some falsely understood egalitarianism or sense of human equality. The
Bahai teachings make clear that equality is a chimera. Our uniqueness as
individuals derives from our constitutive relation with others, from our
living in community, indeed, a number of factors.
The epistolary form was long associated in the western tradition with the
feminine and the history of female subjection. As far back as Cicero in
the first century BC, it was associated with everyday speech. Here in this
autobiography my letters function as a crucial form of communication in
the teaching and consolidation work of a pioneer. Indeed, one could say
35

that my story, the narratability of my life, my very uniqueness, arises
within the context of an interaction process that the letter goes along way
to illustrate. The following Latin expression contains some truth: vox
audita perit littera scripta manet--The voice heard vanishes, the letter
written remains.
The dynamics of epistolary writing have been much studied in recent
years. Analysts who read and study letters see them as something more
than simple documents of a particular time and place. They, or at least
some, see the letters as text that are only partly susceptible to explication
or decipherability. Such documents bear a different relation to the world
for a future reader than for the writer at the point when the letter was
originally written. In some ways this is only stating the obvious. The act
of reading a collection of published letters is inevitably shaped by a series
of decisions made by both the letter-writers themselves and the readers.
Letters are often exchanged, perhaps for years, usually without either
participant considering them as an exercise leading to publication. There
are at least two people I wrote to over more than ten years and a sub-
collection of these letters would fill a sizeable book but, when they were
written it was for the immediate purpose at hand not with the view to
being read at some future time. T.S. Eliot puts this process well:
The desire to write a letter, to put down what you dont want anybody else
to see but the person you are writing to, but which you do not want to be
destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to
read, is ineradicable. (T.S. Eliot, English Poets As Letters Writers, From
a lecture given in 1933 at Yale University) Certainly the extensive
collection of my letters sent and received to these two individuals might
take a future reader into the hearts and minds of three people at a unique,
a significant, time in history and shed light on the period in question in
ways that other genres of writing cannot and will not do. This sub-
collection could be said to be (a) a dramatization of the appreciation of
one man for the poetry of the most significant poet of the epochs under
review and (b) the effort of one Bahai to explore his Faith en passant,
indirectly, to a friend, colleague and fellow retiree. These two
interlocutors are not so much possessed of a literary calibre superior to
others I wrote to, although in most cases that was true, but the
correspondence went on for many years, more years than that of others.
Eliot goes on:We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends,
and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever
read what we have written. There are several components in what we
could call this selective and personal epistolary machine: the act of
36

writing, the act of reading and the world of interpretation. To focus on
reading is to bring to light the complexity of the communication process,
to recall that not all of a readers questions are going to be answered by
reading the said letters. Readers may only have partially formulated
questions in their minds or, perhaps, they may not even understand their
own questions. Any message, including a letter, encounters a scrambling
process upon entering the readers zone of associations and responses. I
wish readers well dealing with the inevitabilities of scrambling which
they will have to deal with in my letters. There is a conceptual
intersection in each letter between reader, writer and world. And it is a
busy intersection. And the discourse that takes place at these intersections
possesses a paradoxical entwinement of minds and words. This is true of
snail-mail or fiber-optic-borne email. Like the view at a busy intersection,
much of what is seen is predictable while at the same time the specific
details are to a large extent unknown or seen so differently by each
spectator.
A recent essay that I wrote introducing a volume of letters gathered in the
first years of my retirement will serve to illustrate many of the things Id
like to say about this overall collection of letters. They were letters
written just before and just after the completion of the Arc Project in
2001. I think, as Emerson wrote, that letters often put things better than
verbal communication and provide perspectives that are timely here in
this ongoing autobiographical statement. The letters of James Boswell, to
chose for comparison one historical example from collections of letters,
open a window onto the real man, a man hidden behind his great
biography, his biography of Samuel Johnson. Of course, one must be
sensitive, too, to epistolary disguise, posing, theatrical attentiveness to the
social presentation of self, concern for appearances, standardization of
responses and what might be called mannerisms in letter writing. As in
life, there are many selves which write letters, many social conventions,
courtesies, honesties, et cetera. and there are many worlds about which a
writer writes.
It is the fate of those who toil at many of lifes employments, particularly
the more introspective arts of which letter writing is one, to be driven
more by the fear of evil, sin, personal inadequacy, regret and remorse, the
sense of disappointment and the many discouraging aspects of life, than
they are attracted by the prospect of good, of virtue, of praise or of
victory, of giving pleasure and peace to readers. Many of the scribblers
on the journey of life, ones I have met and ones I have not, are often
exposed more to censure, with little hope of praise. They feel the disgrace
of their miscarriages, the insufficiency of their language and the
37

punishments they might receive or have received for their neglect of duty,
principle or person. Their success, if any, has often been, if not usually,
without applause and their diligence has reaped no external reward. Also,
as Susan Sontag noted parenthetically in her preface to Letters: Summer
1926, the greatest writers invariably demand too much of, and are failed
by, readers. It would be pretentious for me to claim to be a great writer,
but I have been aware of the implicit and explicit demands I may make on
readers and of the importance of keeping my expectations low. I have
tried for many a year to put these principles into practice for Sontag is
right.
Among these unhappy mortals are the writers of letters. Humankind
seems to consider them like pioneers of literature doomed to work in
societys private spaces with their home in little mailboxes and, more
recently, in optic space. Every other author aspires to publication and
praise. Letter writers, while they may enjoy a certain wild exuberance,
must resign themselves to the tyranny of time and fashion--and the mind
of one or, at the most, several readers. Each letter has no hope of a mass
audience. There on the page they must disentangle perplexity and
regulate lifes confusion for themselves and their lone readers. They must
make choice out of boundless variety and do it without any established
principle of selection. They must detect adulterations without a settled
test for purity.
It happens, and especially in letter writing, that in things difficult there is
danger from ignorance and there are so many difficult and complex
things in life. In things easy there is danger from confidence and there are
many an aspect of life that is easy and hardly requires any thought. The
mind, afraid of greatness, and disdainful of littleness, hastily brushes over
the more important aspects of life and/or dwells far too little on the
everyday. It withdraws itself from painful epistolary dialogue and from
the search required and so passes with scornful rapidity over tasks not
adequate to its powers. Sometimes it feels too secure to exercise caution
or too anxious for vigorous effort. It is afflicted by a literary idleness on
plain and simple paths; and is often distracted in the labyrinths of life and
interpersonal exchange. Dissipation stalks his literary intentions as words
roll off his pallet onto the page. Readers may wonder what these phrases I
have just written have to do with the art of writing letters. I leave you to
ponder. In an age when little letter writing goes on, I'm not sure how
much meaning readers need to find here in these complex epistolary
ideas.
38

My Letters in Australia's Baha'i Archives

My Letters in Australia's Baha'i Archives

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