Pioneering Over Four Epochs

I have posted a 6000 word essay on the new Ridvan message of 2011. It can be located at:

http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/

or at:

several other internet sites

Ron Price, Australia

I was not an enthusiastic reader as a child, nor in my early adolescence for that matter. I read what I had to in primary school and poured my energies into playing and then organized sport, into trying to make money and then making it, into watching TV and then listening to music after my mother sold the chirping box, into having fun with my friends and into growing from my birth in 1944 to puberty in 1957, into attending meetings with my parents in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation Party, in the churches of various Christian denominations and in a new religion which had been in Canada for only half a century at the time–the Baha’i Faith.

So it was that I never came across Beatrix Potter’s children’s books. Potter died just seven months before I was born. She was a woman ahead of her time. She saw the money-making potential in her most famous character and created the first patented soft-toy in 1903. He was Peter Rabbit—the oldest licensed toy character. She also left an astounding legacy of stories, characters, art and 4000 acres of unspoiled landscape to the world by means of England’s National Trust.

ABC1 screened Miss Potter at 8:30 tonight, Christmas Day. This delightful story of her life from the age of 32 to 47, from about 1898 to about 1913, was a most fitting bit of TV for Christmas Day in Australia. Potter is a post-Victorian and pre-modern writer. Her work is not a moralizing series of books; indeed, one critic calls her work “close to a series of immoral tales.”(1)

In my half a century of writing, 1950 to 2010, I have only written the following sentences about this famous writer: “A visitor to Beatrix Potter’s Hilltop Farm in England’s the Lake District exclaimed, “This is how I always imagined Peter-Rabbit-Land!” But Scotland, and not the Lake District, inspired Potter’s famous tale of Peter Rabbit. What we hold in our imagination is, so often, not fact but fancy–how we wish things, how we think things are. But, in reality, they are not!”(3)

Her writing, her 23 small format children’s books, were the fulfilment not of the facts of life but of a rich imagination, of an acute artistic sensibility, and of simple and not-so-simple fancy. People in our world demand of heritage an imagined, not an actual, past. Sites wilfully contrived often serve heritage better than those faithfully preserved—at least sometimes. This was true of The Beatles’ famous Abbey Road crossing.(2)-Ron Price with thanks to (1)Humphrey Carpenter in Katherine Chandler, “Thoroughly Post-Victorian, Pre-Modern Beatrix,” Children’s Literature Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2007, The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 287–307; (2) “The zebra-crossing made famous by The Beatles is given heritage status,” holidaylettings.co.uk, 25 December 2010; and (3) I did refer to Potter 2 or 3 times in my essays and assorted writings from 1950 to 1995, but these literary efforts are not kept in my computer directory.

Joining the Tower of London
and Buckingham Palace is the
pedestrian crossing near those
Abbey Road studios which the
Beatles made so iconic in 1969.

The crossing which appears on
the Fab Four’s 1969 album title
Abbey Road has become one of
the capital’s biggest attractions:
tourists renting London holiday
homes venture there to mimic
Paul McCartney, John Lennon,
George Harrison & Ringo Starr
just crossing that famous road.

The black and white crossing which
is thought to have moved slightly from
its original position, has now been given
official recognition by heritage minister
John Penrose. The nearby studios were
listed in February 2010. They were the
actually preserved, not wilfully contrived,
not some imagined, made-up past in ’69.(1)

(1) The zebra-crossing made famous by The Beatles was given heritage status this week. Some critics, with a sense of the importance of historical accuracy and detail, have expressed concern that the site of this crossing is not the actual site. That the crossing has been moved to fit the needs of municipal, or perhaps national, heritage preferences, these historical and anthropological connoisseursargue–is a sad commentary on modern commercial dictates.

Ron Price
25 December 2010
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My literary activity on the world-wide-web is a personal and quite industrious enterprize.  When I can find the time, I am engaged in creating across this global internet a tapestry or a jig-saw puzzle of poetry and prose.  At this site, readers will find one of my many internet blogs. Site administrators and moderators have different ways in which they allow writers like myself to place their series of posts.  Often, at least at some sites, a writer or author, an editor or publisher, like myself engages with others and the responses to his or her posts by others are included, responses that these site organizers have decided are worthy of being included among the threads of discourse.   There is no mechanism for others to reply directly on my website but, should anyone want to do so, they can reply to what I have written on my website within the context of this internet site.

My series of posts at any one site, posts in addition to my webiste, are just one of the many parts of my internet tapestry, my immense jig-saw puzzle, of prose and poetry which I refer to above. Sometimes the series of posts at some site becomes lengthy and sometimes it remains brief.  Like pieces of cloth or pieces of that jig-saw puzzle, the size, the shape and the length remain a bit of a mystery until some of my story is told, until time takes its course across life’s path and across the threads that are part of the particular internet site in question.   My website has 42 sub-sections of prose and poetry on topics of personal interst, with nothing for sale and with no aggressive proselytism for one or more of the umpteen causes now proliferating across the planet.  There are now some 450,000 words, the equivalent of six books, which readers can get ‘into’ if they so desire.

This literary creation, this literary industry, has been created in the early evening of my life, in the last years of my middle age(56-59) and the first years of my late adulthood(60-66), by this retired teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator, now journalist and independent scholar, who became 66 in July 2010.   He attempts to endow many a theme from the social sciences and humanities, from spiritual and secular subjects, with many layers of meaning.  He tries to combine a high seriousness with a light and humorous style when appropriate and when he is able—for there is more to life than interaction in cyberspace.  This literary goal, though, is difficult to achieve.  It has been a slowly evolving literary ambition since: (a) settling into Australian society in the 1970s after moving from Canada where I was born in 1944, (b) marrying for a second time in 1975 and (c) raising three children who in 2010 were: 43, 40 and 33 years old.