If experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes, I'd had plenty of that. My hope is that not too many readers will find these volumes of my memoirs unapproachable due to their length, their vocabulary, their overly analytical nature, the absence of a simple and interesting storyline, the relative absence of the traumatic conveyed in narrative form--society's violence and sex and mine--the short supply of romance and the kind of adventure that readers have come to expect in a good novel or TV program. If I possessed the humour and masterly narrative style of, say, a Garrison Keilor or a Clive James this work could be more enchanting, hypnotic and funny. Sad to say, I do not. Readers will get what they see here. I am what I am and my style is what it is. My ruminations are rarely profound, never unique and at best, an original hotch-potch of stuff to satisfy me as I go along. Hopes and wishes are never quite enough to determine an outcome, although they have helped me travel along the road of life and of writing.

If one is to stay creative and remain tuned-in to the richness of being, of living, of reflecting and anticipating, as one must if one is writing one's autobiographical story in the seventh decade of their life; and if one is not to yield to depressing tones of déjà vu, one has to admit it is the fragment that offers an opening onto potential meaning. The fragment is imagination's stimulus to the opening of windows. For things in their meaningfulness, address us in a certain way. This is part of what we could call the realm of responsiveness, a realm that is an encounter, an encounter that is essentially a linguistic relationship. To put this another way: it is a way of saying things that keeps the process fresh for the writer. But, in the end, this writer needs vision, needs a big picture what is now called by some a metanarrative. But all is not words; poetry and thinking belong together in speech and in their devotion to the relation which is silent in all our speech. Wallace Stevens expressed the wonder of the world and its shining by means of the poetic word in the following lines of his poem "The Idea of Order at Key West:"

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the sole artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang,
The sea, Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.

Stevens knew that there is no world other than the one we create, the one of which we are the makers. And I have made a world here in this memoir. It is I who did inhabit it and must inhabit it as I write and, as in the daily routine of life, it seems to me that if there is no joy, no happiness, it is hardly worth the exercise. The fragment, in this case the sea in Stevens' poem, does not deal with wholeness, although it may contribute to the completed account. Only through the fragment can one have access to a way of being that is dynamic, pluralistic and self-regenerating. To say this a little differently: lived experience is a critical shaping force in our lives. In some ways, this is only saying the obvious. Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer writes in her introduction to the autobiography of Naguib Mahfouz that for him “life was a search in which one must find one's own sign-posts." This we all must do; the statement hardly needs saying it is so obvious. --enough for now.-Ron Price, Australia