RonPrice
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Registered: Feb 2007
Local time: 07:18 AM
Location: George Town Tasmania Australia
Posts: 7
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SOMETHING OF MYSELF
English poet and novelist, Rudyard Kipling died on January 18th 1936. A "new hour had struck in the history"1 of the Bahá’í Faith. A new stage was set, a stage synchronizing with the deepening gloom in the world. That stage was the devising, the inauguration, of a plan for the systematic spread of the Faith in the United States beginning in May 1936. The prosecution of that Plan began in April/May 1937. In March 1937 Kipling's autobiography Something Of Myself was published. The extent to which Kipling’s description of his life failed to match what actually happened is extraordinary.
In the first sentence of his autobiography Kipling said he was dealt a set of cards and he had to play these cards during his life "as they came." I could very well have opened my own autobiography published sixty-six years later with that same line. In the last chapter of his book he said that writing to him had always been "a physical pleasure."2 Writing became that to me by degrees, sensibly and insensibly. A preamble stage existed in the years of my childhood and adolescence: 1944-1962. From 1962/3 to 1972/3 I now see as stage 1 of my literary life; 1972/3-1982/3 was stage 2; 1982/3-1992/3 was stage 3 and 1992/3-2002/3 was stage 4. I have just begun stage 5: 2002/3 to the present. That sense of physical pleasure Kipling described did not enter my sensory emporium until stage 2.
-Ron Price with thanks to 1Shoghi Effendi, "Cablegram October 26, 1935," Messages To America, Wilmeete, 1947, p.5. and 2Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Macmillan, London, 1937.
I came to the pleasure of ink,
by degrees 36 years after you
had left this mortal coil and
that Plan had made an epochal
shift. That pleasure served to
keep me inside myself as it did
you those many years--you with
your daemon and me the leaven
of that Ideal King and Educator.
We both enjoyed our trade tools--
books--Petrarch's friendly society
found in a convenient chamber in
a humble corner of our habitations
and me taking delight in retirement's
tranquillity by this river near the sea.
I was just getting going at last
when you were slowing the pace,1
but for both of us writing was
inseparable from our social,
political and religious views
reaching out to human beings.
1 Kipling(1865-1936) kept writing until the early 1930s, to the age of 65/6. In the previous ten years, from say 55 to 65, his pace began to slow. I was only starting to pick up my pace at the age of 55 after I retired from full-time work.
Ron Price
17 February 2007
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02-27-2007 01:07 PM
