RonPrice
After 14 hours of being out of bed and 11 hours after leaving George Town Tasmania, I make this first journal entry during this 28 day trip to Haifa, the Bahá'í World Centre(BWC) and back to George Town. After reading the first three chapters of H.A.L. Fisher’s A History of Europe and the first 15 pages of D.M. Low’s abridged(1963) edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I can’t help but feel: (a) the immense contrast between the pre-industrial and pre-modern worlds and our own and (b) the great swim that is our own world. My wife, Chris, and I have been at this Melbourne airport for four hours. It is like being in a huge department store, an immense hanger, a futuristic-other world.
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After reading Gibbon and Fisher, after two long walks in this airport-city of Hong Kong, I seemed ready to start this journal/diary of the 28 day trip to and from the Baha'i World Centre in Israel. There are so many different impressions, thoughts, stimuli and reflections that can occupy the pen as it moves and records the passing moment and what occupies the brain in this new world of a few passing seconds. To make this writing of value to a future age, as W.H. Auden said was a useful aim for a writer, let me focus as sharply as I can on the time, the stage, the phase, the epoch in which the Bahá'í international community is presently engaged in its global enterprize. In doing so I hope that I don’t make the mistake that Oscar Wilde said was one so often made by the English. "The English,” he said, “are always degrading truth into facts" Wilde complained in Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated: "When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value." Yes, Oscar, there is some truth there. Sadly or not so sadly, my journal has many of these so-called facts.
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Gibbon refers to: chastity, temperance, liberality and mercifulness but, he says, that “they only deserve the name of virtue”(p.471) “when they are supported by courage and regulated by discretion.” I am not sure just what he means here but, it seems to me that he is hinting at a depth beyond the surface meaning of these quotations or, at least an application of these qualities as appropriate to the situation across a wide ocean of experience of the vicissitudes of this earthly life. Whole generations have been swept away in these epochs of the tempest in the lifetimes of my parents and myself since the passing of Baha’u’llah in 1892. Wealth and indolence has become for many the basis of a lifestyle and they tend to relax the springs of action.(p.491). The French sociologist Toqueville says much the same thing. But enough for now; it is time for bed at only 9:15 p.m.
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I have been reading this work for nearly half a century. In the last several days I have marked some 30 passages that seem to have some relevance, in one way or another, to the Bahá'í experience, its history and teachings, the setting in which this Faith exists and its ultimate reach in the centuries ahead. I will deal with these quotations when I get back to George Town as I will deal with many things that have stimulated my sensory and intellectual, my aesthetic and spiritual emporiums, during this experience half a world away from my home in the Antipodes.
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Anyone who would like to record some of their impressions of Gibbon---feel free to join me here.-Ron in Australia
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After reading Gibbon and Fisher, after two long walks in this airport-city of Hong Kong, I seemed ready to start this journal/diary of the 28 day trip to and from the Baha'i World Centre in Israel. There are so many different impressions, thoughts, stimuli and reflections that can occupy the pen as it moves and records the passing moment and what occupies the brain in this new world of a few passing seconds. To make this writing of value to a future age, as W.H. Auden said was a useful aim for a writer, let me focus as sharply as I can on the time, the stage, the phase, the epoch in which the Bahá'í international community is presently engaged in its global enterprize. In doing so I hope that I don’t make the mistake that Oscar Wilde said was one so often made by the English. "The English,” he said, “are always degrading truth into facts" Wilde complained in Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated: "When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value." Yes, Oscar, there is some truth there. Sadly or not so sadly, my journal has many of these so-called facts.
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Gibbon refers to: chastity, temperance, liberality and mercifulness but, he says, that “they only deserve the name of virtue”(p.471) “when they are supported by courage and regulated by discretion.” I am not sure just what he means here but, it seems to me that he is hinting at a depth beyond the surface meaning of these quotations or, at least an application of these qualities as appropriate to the situation across a wide ocean of experience of the vicissitudes of this earthly life. Whole generations have been swept away in these epochs of the tempest in the lifetimes of my parents and myself since the passing of Baha’u’llah in 1892. Wealth and indolence has become for many the basis of a lifestyle and they tend to relax the springs of action.(p.491). The French sociologist Toqueville says much the same thing. But enough for now; it is time for bed at only 9:15 p.m.
-----------------------
I have been reading this work for nearly half a century. In the last several days I have marked some 30 passages that seem to have some relevance, in one way or another, to the Bahá'í experience, its history and teachings, the setting in which this Faith exists and its ultimate reach in the centuries ahead. I will deal with these quotations when I get back to George Town as I will deal with many things that have stimulated my sensory and intellectual, my aesthetic and spiritual emporiums, during this experience half a world away from my home in the Antipodes.
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Anyone who would like to record some of their impressions of Gibbon---feel free to join me here.-Ron in Australia