The poet Byron expressed the view that his writing derived from a painful intensification of self and the desire for relief from it. To withdraw himself from himself, to be relieved from what he saw as his "cursed selfishness," this was his sole, his entire, his "sincere motive in scribbling at all." While I find there is some truth in this explanation for the origins of my writing, there is so much more to it; indeed, the raison d'etre is quite complex. It is a subject I have gone into from time to time throughout this memoir and I feel the need to expatiate on it to touch the motivational matrix, the explanatory framework, for why and what I am doing. Writing as I do here may be an escape from self, but it is also a royal road to selfhood. This work also negotiates the relationship between self and community in both the Bahá'í Faith and the nations I have lived in, Australia and Canada. This exercise in negotiation is also a source of the complexity I refer to above. There seem to have been many different impulses at work in these volumes.

1. COMPANION PIECE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOL5 CHAPTER 11
The following chapter of volume 5--and volume 3 in the three volume set
at Lulu.com--is to be added to my autobiography after my passing at the
instigation of my literary executor(s). The reason for this is the ‘personal
nature’ of some of the material. I have placed some of the less personal
material here from this last chapter. Readers who have followed my
autobiography thusfar will be able to finish this story, this analysis, this
memoir, this autobiography in many genres, when they hear of my demise
when my literary executor places this addition into the text of my work, if
he she or it ever does. -Ron Price, for my 65th
birthday on 23 July 2009.
VOLUME 5: CHAPTER 11
THE YEARS OF LATE ADULTHOOD
There are several major models of human development and all of them
outline a series of stages. In this autobiography/memoir I draw on several
models and their sets of terms. Erik Erikson’s eight stage psycho-social
model refers to the years from 60 to 80 as late adulthood. Gail Sheehy
writes about a Second Adulthood beginning at 45. Another model divides
old age into three phases or stages beginning at age 65: young old(65-74),
old old(75-84) and oldest old(86 and above) with centenarians, of course,
those 100 and more.
I am now 65 and as I move through these middle years(65-75) of late
adulthood(60-80), as I come to the end of the second decade of Sheehy’s
Second Adulthood, as I enter the first years of the ‘young-old’(65-74) stage
of life, I continue in this chapter, the final one as I presently anticipate, of an
autobiography I started nearly 25 years ago. There is no doubt, and the
philosopher Nietzsche who emphasized the idea, that time plays a major role
in how human beings define themselves. The sense of the historical, the
sense of pain, of melancholy, of boredom and much else are all involved in
the sense of time and time has certainly played a part in my conception of
this work.
Many writers describe quite movingly the years of late adulthood and old
age and perhaps I will in the years ahead. It is not my purpose to summarize
society’s story, a story which can easily be read with some or much effort
and interest in a myriad sources in the public domain. But I will refer to

2. some of the writings on the subject of late adulthood and old age as I pass
by, as I engage in, this survey of these twenty years from 60 to 80, the early
years of old age from 65 to 74 and some of that old-old phase from 75 to 84.
‘Non-renewable’ has been a term in the public domain that has had
increased frequency since my middle age(40-60: 1984-2004). Certainly my
life and its non-renewable time is something I pass through with a sense of
nostalgia for what has gone. There is a sense of ontological security about
the past, a sense that the future can not possess. Age, as Goethe says, takes
us by surprise and we are insensibly forced to look at it. We may have an
old body but our inner self may remain young. In my case I began to feel
old in my fifties; that was one reason I retired at 55. I was already feeling
old, or at least I experienced the beginnings of such a feeling at that point in
my life. When I read that Kierkegaard felt old when he was born, I was
comforted in my own somewhat early feeling of being old.
Although feeling old, I felt I was in some ways chronicling the zeitgeist of
our time. I felt like this in my better moments and in my worst moments I
felt I just might be wasting my time. T.S. Eliot had warned me in something
he wrote and which I first read back in the 1980s when I was teaching
English literature that the writer, the poet, must be prepared that all his
writing might just come to naught. And indeed, I have been warned.
There is one topic I would like to put to bed, at least give greater exposure to
in these final pages, because of the personal importance it became to me in
my late forties and still is nearly twenty years later. I alluded to it in Volume
4 Chapter 7, the last chapter before my epilogue. I included it in a series of
updates I made to the first edition of this autobiography. It is not my
intention to put this section on the internet because of the confessional
nature of this topic, the embarrassment it gives me to talk about it publicly
and, therefore, it is my present intention to keep this chapter, this section of
my autobiography, private until after my death. On the other hand the
contents of this chapter may come, in time, not to be embarrassing. Time
will tell. Much, indeed, most of what I write that falls into the confessional
and too embarrassing category I have written in my journal and I have left
that to my executors to decide what to do with it, if anything.

3. Saul Bellow once wrote that “disappearing from something and never
coming back”1
was his way of making a significant change. When this
chapter is made public I will have made a significant change in my life; I
will have disappeared and I will never be coming back! Death puts us all in a
hole, as the Báb once wrote, “for those who speak no more,” unless, of
course, we are cremated and then our ashes can go anywhere.
In 1991 I began to write poetry with a frequency that increased by 1992 to a
point where it could be called an obsession and it remains an obsession to
this day. It was a type of poetry that increasingly combined the prose which
had been an important part of my life since the start of my pioneering
experience thirty years before. At the same time, in my late forties, it
became obvious that my sexual activity was going to remain, in all
likelihood and for the most part, an unfulfilled fantasy and desire. Except
for two short-brief periods in the first few months-years of both my
marriages, my sex drive proved to be an instinctual urge that was difficult to
satisfy. The reasons are complex and I hope to dwell on them at another
time.
"When you've finished a patch of your life,” Doris Lessing once said in an
interview, “you look back and you see that it has a pattern which you didn't
notice when you were living it."2
I’m sure that will be true of these years of
late adulthood as well. One such pattern emerged somewhat serendipitously
and I can see that pattern as I cast my eye over all those years of moving
from place to place. I can now see those same years, if I desire, in
juxtaposiiton with the five travel books of Mark Twain. Were I to follow
Mark Twain’s pattern I might write or I might have written, seven to
fourteen such books for the major regions in which I lived and had my being
during my pioneer days. I could very well see what has been written here in
this autobiography as a series of travel books very much in the vein of
Twain’s style.
1
Saul Bellow, “Talk With Saul Bellow,” Harvey Brett, The New York
Times On the Web, September 20th
1953.
2
Doris Lessing in The Progressive, June 1999.
2

4. Against this 19th
century American writer’s travel books the charge might be
brought that they are ill-composed: the chapters follow a certain
chronological and geographical order; but the paragraphs frequently seem to
owe their juxtaposition to the most casual association of ideas. This license
was the law and studied practice of Mark Twain’s humour. “To bring
incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes
purposeless way, and to seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,
is the basis,” Mark Twain declared, “of the American art.”
I don’t see my juxtapositions as absurdities, but there are many an
incongruity and I do wander about in my outline and description of each
locality where my soul, for a time, resided. Mark Twain saw his travel
books as collections of joyous miscellany. Mine, too, are a miscellany but
with ingredients preconsidered and formulable. I am not as inflexible as
Aristotle in the importance I give to choosing my subject matter. I hold with
the classicists, as Twain did, that the proper study of mankind is man. We
both traverse in each of our travel books territory of world-wide interest, or
so it seems to me. He describes what meets his eye with rapid, vivid,
unconventional eloquence. I describe what meets my mind more than my
eye, although I don’t think my phases are particularly unconventional and
my wife would say I possess a certain visual illiteracy.
I sketch historical background in a highly personal fashion and give to that
background an individual twist. While both Mark Twain and I impart a
good quantity of information, hopefully useful and sometimes diverting, we
keep the thread of our personal adventures spinning, rhapsodising each page
each in our own style. Twain clowns around or introduces an elaborate
burlesque on the enthusiasm of previous travellers.3
I maintain a more
serious demeanour for my concoction. For both of us, though, we provide a
prepared concoction each of us in various degrees of preparedness.
Time will not reduce the rich variety of the topics, the subjects and the
landscapes that come under the survey of my mind and eye, though time
will inevitably alter both my descriptions and the nature of the curiosity and
3
Mark Twain in The Cambridge History of English and American
Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21), Volume XVII, Later National
Literature, Part II, Mark Twain.

5. the degree of interest of the readers who come across this work. The type of
reader who will one day take an interest in this autobiography may, in fact,
never come to exist and, if he does, he may after a short time become
extinct. On the other hand such readers may continue to inhabit the globe
and gratify their historical sense by acquaintance with a certain pioneer of
yesteryear on a tremendous voyage over four epochs in the first century of
the Formative Age.
Joining this pioneer and this reader in a journey across two continents, the
reader may find that my mental acuity has been sharpened by the tempest of
two world wars which took place in the thirty years before he was born. The
slaughter of millions during this thirty year period and the sixty-five after his
birth by a mix of other methods would be enough to either sharpen or
asphyxiate the mind and emotions. Readers of whatever quantity that arise
in future years may find, too, that this pioneer’s spirit was left reeling and
his mind bewildered as it watched some mighty wind of God invading the
earth and deranging its equilibrium. If it was not a mighty wind of God that
deranged his equilibrium from time to time, it was a series of events, partly
chemical in nature, partly circumstantial and partly due to life’s inaccessible
mysteries that afflicted his mind and troubled his spirit.
Mark Twain in gathering together his travel books followed his own advice
to Rudyard Kipling: “Young man, first get your facts; then distort them as
you please.” In the process, one could argue, Mark Twain produces a more
readable book. The facts get distorted and vitalized by means of some
poetical enlargement into a great adventure for the mass market. My
problem is not to get my facts, but to choose them and arrange them in such
a way that they please me and interest my readers. This is no easy task. I
bring poetical enlargement to the exercise, but I strive to present that
enlargement in a context of accuracy, personal experience and societal
understanding. Whether I please the reader, I shall probably never know,
although I have been getting some useful feedback on the internet in the last
half-dozen years, some positive and some negative.
We forget, obsessed as many of us are with extending our lives, that death
lasts much longer, and as private as mourning may be, tombstones are often
our most public and enduring record. Perhaps we all should follow Sir
Rupert Hart-Davis' example given to him by T.S. Eliot, a man not noted for
his comedic aspirations. To eulogize he told mourners an anecdote: "One
day when Eliot was being driven somewhere, he and the chauffeur passed

6. the time by discussing the merits of their respective dogs. Eventually the
chauffeur thought that perhaps he had overpraised his own dog, and said,
'But, sir, he isn't really what you'd call a consequential dog.'" Of course Eliot
was a consequential man, and his chauffeur knew it. But speak of things too
consequentially and they do get ridiculous. How do you lend weight to ashes
without appearing to apply them, like war paint, to your own reputation? By
laughing the whole business off, acknowledging that even the most
consequential dog has its final day, one can take a serious subject and
lighten its effect, make it arguably inconsequential.
I forget, too, at least I do not give sufficient emphasis, that the concept,
process and outcome of writing is based on collaboration. Thinking and
creativity are essentially social processes. My individual identity is a
synthesis of the qualities of multiple role models and influences.
Collaboration contributes to vitality by supporting the ongoing development
of a changing self. That creativity may be seen as a social process could be
a slightly contentious claim. Arguments are often made for one individual’s
ability to think and create effectively in sustained isolation; for example,
Henry David Thoreau or Ludwig Wittgenstein among other writers.
However, I think it is true that we live in an age where, as isolated and even
alienated as many feel, with a lack of community at the heart of so much
unhappiness in contemporary Western society, never before has there been
such a profound and sustained engagement with the notion of collaboration
in the arts, especially working cross-arts with the possibility of thinking as a
social process.
The late twentieth into the twenty-first century has seen creative
collaboration develop in a range of contexts, though it continues to be the
inevitable outcome of two or more artists/creative people deciding to share
ideas and practice. But collaboration has also become an academic
goal/strategy/methodology, recognized as useful for creative projects. It is
now, of course, significantly aided by computer technology and the Internet,
which enhance the possibility of worthwhile long-distance collaboration.
Indeed collaborators ping-pong files across continents as well as counties.
Text can be sent with such speed and alacrity that the creative momentum is
easily sustained. Much of this autobiography is the result of ideas, of text,
of borrowing, of synthesizing, the work of others and making my own mix
of it all.

7. Much of my writing is done within predetermined frames, but this does not
make my work flawed and unexercised. This is how Naipaul views
Conrad's creative imagination. "Conrad's subjects and all his conclusions
seemed to have existed in his head when he settled down to write. We
almost begin with the truth, portable truths, as it were, that can sometimes be
rendered as aphorisms and work through to their demonstration." Other
contemporary writers Naipaul denounces for their experimentation and
linguistic play as existing for their own sake, or for private glamour with the
writer no longer awakening the reader to "the sense of true wonder". I’m not
sure how Naipaul would view my work. He likely never will. But, if my
writing comes to be seen as Naipaul’s was by one critic: “a wonder of
clarity with complex ideas given shape in simple English and achieving that
most difficult of tasks--having writer and reader seem simultaneously to be
making the same journey—I will feel the road has been worth walking.
Writers are often untrustworthy when it comes to explaining the nature of
their craft and calling. I hope I am not in that category. I present myself as
an explorer on a heuristic voyage. My themes, I like to think, are consistent
and obsessive. I could not describe myself the way Naipaul did with the
following words: ''I couldn't truly call myself a reader. I have never had the
capacity to lose myself in a book; like my father, I could read only in little
bits. In my early career I hadn't begun to think in any concrete way about
what I might write. Yet I continued to think of myself as a writer.''
I, on the other hand, am a reader, often in little bits but often, too, lost in the
print. Until my forties I had no idea what I might write, although I knew I
did want to write much more than in classrooms for students. But from the
age of forty to sixty-five, from 1984 to 2009, that changed by sensible and
insensible degrees until the activity took over my life and one of the results
is this memoir. Like Naipaul I have tried to recognise the fragmented
aspects of my identity and to see how they enabled me to become who I now
am. This is a ceaseless process, this reconstituting of my individual self
deep in its home in history. It is what much of Naipaul's work has been
compulsively engaged in—and much of mine.4
The greatest miracle for
Naipal, he says, was getting started. I feel--and the anxiety is still vivid to
me--that I might easily have failed before I began. For me, this getting
4
Robert McCrum, “Fragments from a Universal History,” The Observer,
Sunday 18 January 2004

8. started has gone on for the last 65 years. Who knows what lies ahead now
that I have begun!?
The nineteenth-century French critic Sainte-Beuve believed that to
understand a writer it was necessary to know as much as possible about the
exterior man, the details of his life. If this is true I have certainly provided
those details. But this method is a beguiling one, argues Naipal in his
acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. Using the man
to illuminate the work can only take one so far. This position might even
seem unassailable. But Proust was able very convincingly to pick this view
apart and readers of this autobiography need to keep Proust’s comment in
mind as they reflect on what they have read here. Proust wrote that: "This
method of Sainte-Beuve ignores what a very slight degree of self-
acquaintance with the writer teaches us; namely, that a book is the product
of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life,
in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by
searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there, that we may
arrive at it."
Those words of Proust should be with readers here as they survey my life
and this work which depends on what can be called inspiration. I have laid
out a great deal of detail about my life and my quirks and friendships, but
the mystery of the writing remains. No amount of documentation, however
fascinating, can take readers there. The autobiography of a writer will
always have this incompleteness.
"In fact," Proust writes, "it is the secretions of one's innermost self, written
in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public. What one
bestows on private life, in conversation, or in those drawing-room essays
that are scarcely more than conversation in print, is the product of a quite
superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by
putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world."5
In contrast to this type of autobiographical intimacy is the life and attitude to
self and others of Sir Isaac Newton. I came across a biography of Newton
just three days before my 65th
birthday.6
I am not inclined to read a
biography from cover to cover and was pleased to be able to read a review
5
Marcel Proust in V.S. Naipaul’s Acceptance Speech in 2001 for the Nobel
Prize in Literature.

9. by John Derbyshire. That Sir Isaac Newton was a tremendous genius, there
is no doubt at all, writes Derbyshire. There are excellent arguments for the
proposition that, so far as mathematics and its physical applications are
concerned, Newton’s mind was among the most powerful that ever existed.
The story of Newton’s life is, however, to put it very mildly indeed, not
enthralling. He never travelled outside eastern England. He took no part in
business or in war. In spite of having lived through some of the greatest
events in English constitutional history, he seems to have had no interest in
public affairs. His brief tenure as a Member of Parliament for Cambridge
University made not a ripple on the political scene. Newton had no intimate
connections with other human beings. On his own testimony which there is
no strong reason to doubt--he died a virgin. He was similarly indifferent to
friendship and published only with reluctance and, then, often anonymously.
He was afraid that public esteem, if he were able to acquire and maintain it,
would perhaps increase his social profile, the acquaintance of others, the
thing which he wanted to avoid at all costs. His relationships with his peers,
when not tepidly absent-minded, were dominated by petty squabbles, which
he conducted with an irritated punctiliousness that never quite rose even to
the level of an interesting vehemence. He was, “a cold fish,” as the English
say.
In all probability a biography of Newton, or an autobiography by him had he
chose to write one, would never catch the public eye and result in popularity.
If this lengthy work in five volumes suffers a similar fate I will feel I am in
good company. Fara's book is an intellectual history that follows how the
image of Newton was shaped and re-shaped over the centuries, often to fit
the needs of changing society or even just individuals. It is unlikely that my
work will follow a similar intellectual path down the centuries. If it follows
any path at all and if I am in a position to assess that path from the world
beyond, I look forward to the exercise in that busy Land of Lights.
6
Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius, Patricia Fara, Columbia
University Press, 2002. See book review by John Derbyshire, “The Apple in
Our Eye,” in The New Criterion, May 2003.

10. by John Derbyshire. That Sir Isaac Newton was a tremendous genius, there
is no doubt at all, writes Derbyshire. There are excellent arguments for the
proposition that, so far as mathematics and its physical applications are
concerned, Newton’s mind was among the most powerful that ever existed.
The story of Newton’s life is, however, to put it very mildly indeed, not
enthralling. He never travelled outside eastern England. He took no part in
business or in war. In spite of having lived through some of the greatest
events in English constitutional history, he seems to have had no interest in
public affairs. His brief tenure as a Member of Parliament for Cambridge
University made not a ripple on the political scene. Newton had no intimate
connections with other human beings. On his own testimony which there is
no strong reason to doubt--he died a virgin. He was similarly indifferent to
friendship and published only with reluctance and, then, often anonymously.
He was afraid that public esteem, if he were able to acquire and maintain it,
would perhaps increase his social profile, the acquaintance of others, the
thing which he wanted to avoid at all costs. His relationships with his peers,
when not tepidly absent-minded, were dominated by petty squabbles, which
he conducted with an irritated punctiliousness that never quite rose even to
the level of an interesting vehemence. He was, “a cold fish,” as the English
say.
In all probability a biography of Newton, or an autobiography by him had he
chose to write one, would never catch the public eye and result in popularity.
If this lengthy work in five volumes suffers a similar fate I will feel I am in
good company. Fara's book is an intellectual history that follows how the
image of Newton was shaped and re-shaped over the centuries, often to fit
the needs of changing society or even just individuals. It is unlikely that my
work will follow a similar intellectual path down the centuries. If it follows
any path at all and if I am in a position to assess that path from the world
beyond, I look forward to the exercise in that busy Land of Lights.
6
Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius, Patricia Fara, Columbia
University Press, 2002. See book review by John Derbyshire, “The Apple in
Our Eye,” in The New Criterion, May 2003.