NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
This is an end-piece to my autobiography, but it contains all sort sof useful material for anyone writing either an autobiography or a biography. I have placed this essay under 'creative writing' because it is (a) a good example of personal / creative writing and (b) it could be useful to all sorts of people writing on all sorts of topics. ADDENDUM OR EPILOGUE Having completed my autobiography or, at least, completed a fifth edition in a form that is satisfactory to me in the first two volumes and keeping in mind that I will in all likelihood make additions to it in the years ahead, I want to write a sort of addendum or epilogue in the pages which follow. I write in part because I want to contribute to the world and audiences read my work in the hope, among other reasons, of finding a new perspective. Therefore, one of my aims is to try and make my perspective new stake out a territory that requires my voice. I feel I have done this in the territory of the Bahai Faith and autobiography.
I may find that, inspite of the best intentions, inspite of my own perception of the quality of this work and the pleasure I take in reading it, my work may not engage the readers in the Bahai community as much as Id like to see happen. I think engagement entails defining a common enterprise that newcomers and community veterans can pursue as they try to develop their interpersonal relationships. I think I do this quite well. But as readers continue in their interacting trajectories in the community and as they continue to shape their identities in relation to one another, they may not find this book that useful. While engagement can be positive, a lack of mutuality in the course of engagement with this book can create relations of marginality, mine and others, that can reach deeply into peoples identities. Im really not sure how successful I have been in the enterprise of truly engaging my readers.
Of course, time will tell, but I must admit to my suspicions which may be mainly a function of age. I like to see imagination, which is a process of expanding the self by transcending time and space and creating new images of the world and the self, as something which entails others locating their sense of engagement in a broader system and defining a personal trajectory that connects what they are doing to an extended personal identity of themselves. Id like to think this autobiography extends the meaning of artifacts, people and actions within the personal spheres of peoples lives, people who read this book. That is what Id like but, again, Im not so sure that I have succeeded in this respect. The sheer proliferation of the objects, diversions, and possibilities for, life in modern society has made modern society, as Walter Lippmann pointed out after WWI in his book The Phantom Public, not visible to anybody, nor intelligible continuously and as a whole.
Abundance has in some ways blunted not only the meaning of experience but also the pleasure to be found in abundance itself. In spite of these complexities and enigmas, the past, my past, has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again by this autobiographer or by historians and social scientists working in very different media: in books, articles, documentaries, inter alia. The actual events, of course, can not be brought back. The past has gone and history is what historians make of it and autobiographers when they go to work.
In Re-thinking History, Keith Jenkins describes history as a discourse that is about, but categorically different from, the past. And so it is that my autobiography is categorically different from my past. As the distinguished historian E. H. Carr put it: facts of the past exist independently of the mind of the historian, but historical facts are only those data selected from the past that a historian finds relevant to his or her argument. The historian can never know the past as it really was, but only how it might have been, since our information about the past is partial and inevitably mediated.
It seems to me this is true, a fortiori, of the autobiographer. Neither I nor the historian enjoys the scientists luxury of being able to conduct and replicate experiments about the past, my past, under controlled conditions. I can test one theory about my life against another theory, as can the historian about some aspect of history. This allows me, as autobiographer, and historians, to develop theories that are more viable. But we can never establish the truthfulness, the validity, of that theory. History and autobiography are both attempts to explain our experience of the present by constructing a viable account of the past, such that if it had taken place then the present we live in would be the case.
History is not an attempt to account for the way things were, but to account for the way things are. When I say that my life has been full of joy and sorrow I eliminate this apparent contradiction or, indeed, any such contradiction, by analysing my life and dividing it into the joyous parts and sorrowful parts. This I have done by discussing these aspects, but I have not precisely quantified these two emotions. My life has been joyous in some respects and sorrowful in others. If, however, life is left whole and is not analysed in respect to these emotions, a myriad of contradictions is often left because that is the nature of the reality in which we live.
While imagination can lead to a positive mode of belonging, it can also result in disconnectedness and greater ineffectiveness; it can be so removed from any lived form of life and activity, membership and meaning, that it detaches the identities of readers and leaves them in a state of uprootedness. Readers can lose touch with their sense of social efficacy by which their experience of the world can be interpreted as competence. While that is not my desire, my autobiography may in the end be just a slippery slope in the direction of discontent and disorientation. Good intentions, as they say, are often the road to greater problems. As a teacher of literature, of English and the social sciences, I know only too well that many students turn off some of the best writers. I, too, am not immune from this experience.
In the end, of course, one writes and sends ones efforts out into the universe and takes what comes. Alignment is a term applied to writing and to autobiography. It entails negotiating perspectives, finding common ground, defining broad visions and aspirations, walking boundaries and reconciling diverging fields of interest. Alignment requires shareable frameworks and paradigms, boundary items and concepts that help to create fixed points around which to coordinate activities, an oeuvre, a life.
It can also require the creation and adoption of broader discourses that help give a literary enterprise some life, some vitality and meaning and by which the microcosm of local actions can be interpreted as fitting within a broader framework. However, alignment can be a violation of a persons sense of self that crushes their identity. In some ways, at least for me, alignment is "the pen's obedience to a line already traced in the mind, if not on the page. To fully participate in community life in the sense that is at the heart of this autobiography each Bahai must find ways to engage in the work, the enterprise in their won individual way. They will do some things that others do, that other community members do, but they must be able to imagine their own work as being an important part of a larger enterprise. And they must be comfortable that the larger enterprise and its smaller components, the many conventions of that community, are compatible with the identities they envision for themselves.
Being a part of the community, then, is not simply a matter of learning new skills, new attitudes and new values, but also of fielding new calls for identity construction. This understanding of identity suggests that people enact and negotiate identities in the world over time. For identity is dynamic and it is something that is presented and re-presented, constructed and reconstructed in interaction. The individual experience of power derives from belonging, but it also derives from exercising control over what they belong to, what they participate in, what they read, indeed, an entire panoply and pageantry of activity. Each individual is heterogeneously made up of various competing discourses, conflicted and often contradictory scripts. Their consciousness is anything but unified.
I emphasize this because in the great wealth of literature now available to the Bahai community both in-house literature and the burgeoning material now available in the marketplace, my book occupies a small place, possesses no particular authority and competes with a print and electronic media industry. In order to survive and do well in most of the print and electronic media a writer must develop the ability to put things simply and effectively, in a manner that everyone can understand. Such a writer has maybe a minute and a half to two minutes if ones talking TV to explain a complex subject or a series of short verbal expositions if its an interview; even a book, if it is to find a large readership in the mass circulation market, must be as simple as possible. If you think that cant be done, youre wrong. However, so many academics and intellectuals are steeped in academic jargon that they cant pull it off. I hope this book is not an example of the latter, of someone who could not pull it off.
Im afraid simplicity and brevity are not marks of my literary style. So, perhaps, I fail here. I knew of a senior academic who was asked to appear on a local TV station. She showed up with six or seven books and they had little pieces of paper stuck in the books for purposes of quotation.
The whole interview was over in less than two minutes; she never read any of her quotations and she was frustrated that she just couldnt make her points. She didnt understand that if youre going to play in the media ballpark, you have to play by their rules, not your own. I like to think that this book, this autobiography, has allowed me to have my six books and their quotations and that the role of this book does not include a two minute TV summary or an interview of ten minutes on an arts program. On the other hand, I could probably write a ten second autobiographical-ad grab, summarize what Im all about in one or two minutes and be interviewed for any appropriate length of time.
Maybe it will ever happen before I die. There are many different kinds of self-referential writing. I have incorporated some of them in what is for me a surprisingly large work invoking Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes, as an appropriate presiding spirit for the genre. Whatever largeness I claim to possess, it is the same largeness we all possess in relation to ourselves.
We all must live in our own skins for all our days and the sense of our largeness -- or our smallness for that matter -- is a result of our bodily manifestation, our physical proximity to self. In the multitude of methods and genres of studies of Bahai history and experience, teachings and organization, autobiography is either tentatively acknowledged, invoked by negation or simply passed over in silence. It is one genre that is, for the most part, conspicuous by its absence from any bibliography. This has begun to change in the last decade or two. This piece of writing is part of that change. So often we commiserate over the lack of history writing or, as Momen puts it, how lamentably neglectful in gathering materials for the history of the Bahai Faith we have been.
History writing and the transmission of the narrative of a group has often been a problem. It wasn't until the 1850 's, writes Russell Short in his review of Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower that William Bradford's narrative of the founding of Plymouth in 1620 was finally published. Only then, after 230 years, did the story of the first years of the history of the USA enter the historical record. While Momen may be right, there are many ways to look at the gathering of historical documents.
Just how this autobiography will appear in the grand scheme of things only time, only history, will tell. This autobiography comes from the historical experience within four epochs in the first century of the Formative Age. While my work makes no attempt, no pretense, to being a history of the period, it does attempt to express the experience of one man. How relevant this will be for future generations I leave to those mysterious dispensations of Providence which I often refer to in this now lengthy book. The details of my experience in this new Faith and the details associated with its origins and development in the various Bahai communities I lived in or was associated with in a broad sense could be said, if one wanted to be critical, to represent 'intentional history, ' a form of social memory which establishes both the image of the past that the community wishes to transmit and its resulting corporate identity.
And I suppose it is difficult to avoid this problem, this tendency, entirely. No matter how frustrating my experience has bernard there is no question that I have suffered as so many have done because of the Baha' community -- -I love this community and a bias toward it is unavoidable. I have gone a long way toward my goal of presenting this community as honestly and accurately as I can, or so it seems to me. The mechanics of constructing the past, my past, my real historical memories and contemporary, homeostatic dynamics of the Bahai community are closely intertwined in the formation and ongoing formation of the meta narrative that is Bahai history. This is inevitable. For history's first historian, Herodotus, there were no official versions.
What mattered to this Greek historian was the local nature of his information, in all its complexity. Some local, some polis idea of its past was a shared possession, rooted in cult and a complex ongoing tradition. For me, on the other hand, there is an official, a written history and it is this history which matters. What also matters, although in quite a different sense, is the local, complex, ongoing, nature of my information, the personal, the complex, the individual, the local, story.
Much of my poetry in this autobiography has a similar emphasis to Homer's and the poetry of many another poet in the sense that it is about: "the poetry of the past. " I use poetry to help me navigate the labyrinth of personal connections, -isms, and the historical nexuses which often seem too complicated for me to find my way through. I hope readers find here a lucidity that helps them cope with the complexity. To make one more comparison between the experience of the Bahai's and the founding fathers of America in 1620 Id like to quote what Philbrick says about these founders, namely, that they "began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past. " It took time for them to appreciate the significance of the Indian religious tradition. Relations with the Indians were the axis, says Philbrick, for a history of the Pilgrims. In time the Pilgrim colony became caught up in massacre and sadness; one could reasonably conclude that this underscores the danger of believing that God guides one's hand.
I used to think the relationship with indigenous peoples was the critical axis of the Bahai community in our time. That was one of the main ideological reasons for going to live, first among the Inuit and then among the Aboriginals. But as time, as my life, has moved on, I am more of the view that a critical axis is the power of understanding. There are other axes, too, but this subject is too long for an exposition on the relevant themes here. For the Bahai's, during the four epochs that was the temporal framework for my experience and that of my community, they too faced crises, as great or greater than those faced by the American Pilgrims. They were crises that threatened to arrest the community's unfold ment from time to time and, as Shoghi Effendi once said threatened to blast all the hopes which its progress had engendered. "There's something terribly feminine about novel writing, John Fowles once wrote.
When you create characters, he went on, all processes are analogous to childbirth, including postnatal depression. When a book is reviewed, it is like the weaning of children. You " re kicked about or even praised -- and the book is separated from you. At a conscious level, this may be painful. But at an unconscious level, this leaves one free -- to write another novel. What Fowles says here about novels has been partly true of my experience of writing this autobiography.
The main difference is that this book is still connected to me by a literary umbilical chord. I will go on working on it for some time to come: until Im tired of it or I die. Fowles goes on to say something which I think is also true of writing autobiography, at least -- partly -- for me. He says: "The novel is an impossible voyage. It's a mystery why you keep doing it. " He asked, "Why is an unhappy ending considered more artistic than a happy ending?" and then answered himself, "In some ways the unhappy ending pleases the novelist.
He has set out on a voyage and announced, I have failed and must set out again. If you create a happy ending, there is a somewhat false sense of having solved life's problems. " For me, the question of endings has not come in to this autobiography. Obviously, I am still alive and could be here for another 30 or 40 years. My story, my autobiography could be only half or two-thirds over. And happiness, for me, has no relationship with the glitter and tinsel of an affluent society or the superficial adjustments to the modern world envisioned by humanitarian movements or publicly proclaimed as the policy of enlightened statesmanship. Happiness is much more of a paradoxical thing, a conundrum, a gallimaufry-to chose a name from a Bah' folk group -- a mixture of unlike things.
I have set out many times on this autobiographical journey. It is a mysterious journey, an impossible one in some ways. This journey could be divided into three aspects: the spatial, the temporal and the intellectual. I divide and mix the three for the sake of convenience. The three are textually interconnected. The temporal journey meshes with the experience of space to shape the protagonist " state me -- intellectual development.
Henri LeFebvre sees space as active, not a passive surface and has three components: perceived, conceived and lived space. Trying to keep the three points of the triad straight is not as important, at least for my argument, as is maintaining a sense of their interlocked relation. Lived, perceived, and conceived space folds into and spins across its several forms, working together to accomplish the production of spaces: place, space, landscape, and location as in -- streets, homes, rooms, fields, buildings, people, inter alia, and become embodied with stories, memories, and all sorts of meanings. Although the world is indeed increasingly well connected, we must hold this in balance with the observation that most people live intensely local lives. This has been true for me throughout these epochs, although in the realm of thought I have been travelling all my pioneering life. Cultural geography is concerned with those aspects of land and space, in both the micro and the macro sense, that shape people's ideas about themselves, and give to their identities a characteristic expression.
Landscape is really an all-embracing concept. It includes virtually everything around us and has manifest significance for everyone. This sub-section of geography, the cultural sphere, formulates the complex strategies of identification that function in the name of a people and a nation. It is here that the recollection, the sense, of home and belonging are constructed and create an imagined and / or a real community. There results from this study of land and space a collectiveness that is addressed in different ways by different peoples, that is part of their identity and that structures belonging.
I have mentioned this from time to time in this autobiography, but it has not occupied much of my attention. This is probably due to the many places I have lived rather than one which has helped to form my identity. This whole question of the sense of identity has been part and parcel of the western literary tradition going right back to Homer and the Old Testament writers. Early poetry of the eighth century BCE, Hesiod, Homer and the tradition they belonged to, has as a major theme the identity of Greek people, whether united in a military expedition as in the Iliad or as a geographical system in the Catalogue of Ships. My poetry and my autobiography is concerned, too, with the notion of identity, the identity of the Bahai community and my own identity both within that community and without.
It is this aspect of my identity that I give more of my attention to in this work. The decision to pioneer internationally in 1971, to go abroad as we used to say, a decision I made with my first wife or, more honestly, because of my first wife, after graduating from college in 1967 and teaching for three years, represented an embrace of the challenges and pleasures of the unfamiliar. This reorientation was also a form of disorientation, for the new that floods in from all sides pulls old assumptions off their moorings. Just as a compelling theory may force students to fall back on what they know, only to find that the theory has changed the way in which they consider this knowledge, so the experience of living on a foreign continent makes one both look homeward and realize that home will never be the same. The lesson I have learned during my 35 years as an expatriate is perhaps best described as a semantic one: home, Canada, and North America ceased forever to be synonyms in my mind.
Even if home still lies over there, certain signs of it greet the eyes of Canadians abroad no matter where we go. Unlike the USA which, more than any other country, extends beyond its borders with its extensive global permutations and permeation's reshaping foreign economic, political, and social, not to mention imaginative landscapes all in the image of America, Canada remains snow locked in a bleak and lonely landscape and, even in our more media-saturated world, the country still lies somewhat remote and isolated, clean and distant. The Canadian or the American abroad -- and certainly me in Australia -- sees that the foreign landscapes where he dwells are no mere mirror images of home. Some landscapes are, of course, familiar in some ways, and some are not. In a globalizing world the experience of fusing our experiences of contemporary reality with the dreams, fantasies, and satellite image-fed visions of everyone and everything from the original European colonizers in our homeland, to a set of explorers like Lewis and Clark or Cartier and Cabot, to Somali refugees, to the likes of al-Qaeda -- -ideas that traditionally resisted borders -- -in this era of mass communication, has virtually eliminated them. To put this a little differently: the world is but one country.
Canada became, particularly in this global age, something that was neither simply a place, nor as a permanent set of values, beliefs, attitudes, or philosophies. It was, it became, an idea, one that was fluid and open to constant change and not defined by traditional constraints like geography, politics, and nationality. My personal experience, however, showed me that thinking of Canada in these terms as I did, was neither simple nor easy. It was easier said than done and, if done as I had done now for over 30 years, it was not easy to put into words.
This was true not only of my Canadian ness but of my pioneering ness and much else. "The art of autobiography has many facets. One of the critical facets is omission. One's own forgetfulness is very important. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere. Most of my life is simply not here. It has been omitted in the interest of interest.
As in the daily round one can only bring to memory a certain portion of ones experience, otherwise one would literally drown in data, in memories, in a chaos of facility. As the world passed through the golden age of astronomy during these epochs, as it advanced through a range of new technologies from the computer to satellite, from radio to TV, video to DVD, inter alia, as it doubled its population from 3 to 6 billion, so much was invented and developed, so much impacted on man and society-but I have omitted the discussion of these and so many other facets of the industrial and commercial developments of our time. Claude Simon, in his lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, said, I find that what one writes or describes is never something which has happened prior to the work of writing. On the contrary the writing produces something in every sense of the term in the course of working. The writing, Simon argues, produces something within its own present.
I find this to be my own experience as well. This work has returned unremittingly to decisive and not so decisive events in my life. I have created a seam of light, of gold, of joy, that has had its source, its origins in the Bahai Faith. With fire my gold has been tested and lifes gold in its many forms has tested this servant again and again.
Many of lifes tests I did not pass. But like a close cricket series, I wont know the score or, indeed, if I won, until the last ball is played. Indeed, Im not so sure the cricket metaphor about winning even applies here because so often in life the first shall be last and the last first. The act of writing for me is more of an effort of understanding.
My aim is to be clear and evocative for in this way I feel more in touch with my subject. After my years of early childhood, I enjoyed life as a student for some twenty years; for many years I enjoyed teaching, perhaps as many as thirty. I dont think I was a natural teacher, but I grew into it. After several years I became successful; I became a person enjoyed by my students and enjoying them. I loved to explain things and rarely made a questioner feel stupid for asking. Although I had broad intellectual interests, my pursuit of career and my involvement in the Bahai Faith left little time for other activities: I did not play golf or follow sports after the age of 21; I did not take up painting or cooking or photography or anything one could call a hobby, although I did collect stamps in my teens; I watched little TV, had no TV from 1956 to 1976, although after I retired I watched over two hours a day; I rarely went to movies, to various forms of entertainment or ate out.
I did sing a little and played the guitar; I joined the Bahai Faith with its world of meetings and outings and I went for a daily walk of about half an hour among a host of other domestic, familial and social activities that are part of the lives of fathers and husbands in the west. I think it highly unlikely that aspects of my life would become legendary as did the lives of many a celebrity in my time. No series of iconographic images evoked from fact and fiction would ever produce a celluloid dream as had been produced for many a culture hero of these four epochs. There would be no fantastical caricature of my life with its inevitable exaggerations, bright colours and haunting themes and images created for the world of cinema. Mementos and mis-remembering, pride and prejudices, would never be mixed together and served up as legend to hungry fans in this or ensuing centuries. Every year hundreds, perhaps thousands of visitors would never flock to some of the locales where I have lived.
No one would ever have to locate or re-locate my legend in some tangled interweaving of history, myth and memories. For the millions and billions of people in this and future centuries whose names, whose lives and memories would be excluded from history, would not be pulled into some timeless world of myth and dream, legend and narrative associated with the places I have lived, my places of memory and my lifes experiences. More generally, will a myth of our time be created, as is so often the case with any and every age, a myth with its myriad of elements, with its enormous disparity between conception and reality? Will that myth spawn an immense literature as is happening to all the ages of the past? The concern of a future time will not be with the reality of our time, the time of these four epochs, but with what people have thought and felt about that reality. This thinking, feeling and remembering will undoubtedly contribute to the myth.
Myth is the stuff of the history of sensibility. One critic of contemporary Hollywood myth expressed the view that If you can find the myth, it hasn't been hidden properly, and if it's been hidden properly, you can't find it for sure. My life which has been so much wrapped up with the Bahai myth and I think I have hidden it in this long work. I have hidden it so well that the average reader will have little idea of what it is.
There is some truth in this cryptic comment of this Hollywood critic. After countless debates and exhaustive deconstructions about my time and my age which are sure to take place in the future, it will be hard to tell what is left. A lot of talking tends to produce this experience of intellectual exhaustion. Certain images will endure for some people and define the age, the time. That imagery may be contested, may be transcendent, may be bewildering, unbending, and even beguiling. For others it will be text, print, that defines an age, a time, a person, a problem not images.
For still others it will be a combination and still others no images and no text will define the item of concern because the subject at issue will not concern them in the slightest. We cant all be concerned about the same stuff. The peculiar and compelling image, the subtle and complex text, will prod a future age to re-examine the fascinating crossroads of myth and memory. They will beckon a revisiting, yet again, of another day. My second wife often complained, although grew to accept, that I devoted insufficient time to my marriage and to shared activity together.
In my retirement this changed a little for the positive we came to spend three or four hours together every day. It is perhaps a matter of personal taste whether one attributes my drive first as a student, then as a teacher and finally as a writer and as a Bahai to personal ego or a genuine commitment to my various roles, roles to learn, to educate and inspire people about learning and to serve the Cause and my writing. Undoubtedly there were elements of all these motivations present at different stages of the life-span. Retirement also brought a greater element of control over my life. Parents, teachers, employers and students had a great deal to say about my life until about the age of sixty.
Then the only person I had to please to any significant extent was my wife and, by the age of sixty, I had that worked out, if not entirely to her satisfaction, at least enough to provide the basis for a household harmony and tranquillity so that I could get on with what had become the passion of my life writing. I once thought that autobiography meant being able to write without artifice, but Id like to think any thoughtful observer of this writer will see a certain cunning, game, play, everywhere. That is what Id like to think. The geography of my book circles and doubles with long footnotes to take the spread of thought.
Why footnotes? As Martin Amis writes in his autobiography: "To preserve the collateral thought. In fact, the whole thing is a lattice of collateral. Like Amis, too, I must confess to having compiled this work with one eye on a remote and exacting audience: posterity. And if not the whole eye, then part of the eye, perhaps the retina or the aqueous humour or the eye brows. But at least the job got done before the body gave way, as...
Free research essays on topics related to: time to time, age of sixty, modern society, electronic media, happy ending
Research essay sample on Age Of Sixty Time To Time
