RonPrice is not currently reading any books.
I’m 65 years old, male, from Australia. I’ve been a DailyLit member since July 11, 2007. My reading interests include memoirs, autobiography, and humanites and social sciences.
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Wuthering Heights - Wuthering Heights & Gondal Poems: A Context
Emily Bronte seemed to be obsessed with what she called her Gondal Poems which she began collecting together in February 1844. This obsession continued right through the publication of Wuthering Heights in 1847 until May 1848. Her poems were about imaginary heroes and heroines and contained a vision of oneness. It was this vision that she sought to communicate in her poetry. These poems and their themes provided a retreat for Emily’s imagination, for her fantasy. They became a necessity for her life. They were a “benignant power” a “solacer of human cares” and a “brighter hope when hope despairs.” -Ron Price with thanks to Juliet Barker, The Brontes, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1994, pp.435-6.
Autobiographies - Some Comments on Autobiographies
I have written several essays exploring the nature of autobiography. These essays introduce the existing five volumes of my Journal or Diary. Other essays explore the nature of journals, diaries and letters as genres that play different roles in my autobiography. There is notenough space to explore my thoughts here and so I will just mention my general interest in this field.
Ideas - Autobiography, Memoirs,Diaries and Journals
Arguably the most popular/common form of literature in the last three hundred years, this topic, this blog, this section of DAILYLIT, will in the next few years come to occupy a solid placein the schemeof topics and subjects.
Reader Challenges - 6 Word Autobiography
child, adolescent, adult, teacher, father, husband
Varieties of Religious Experience - is evil real ?
Well, Vern. Here I am again and belated apologies for responding nearly a year after your post. If you would like to write to me at my email address: ronprice9@gmail.com and continue this discussion in a more logical fashion, do so. for now--it's back to the cold winds of a Tasmanian winter.-Ron
Oscar Wilde - Oscar Wilde
For some, especially writers, language itself is the primary arena within which the shattering experiences of life are coped with and the individual assertivenss and agency becomes manifest from behind the angst. For writers talk is more important than action, indeed talk itself is action because words determine thoughts and actions. "Language... is the parent, and not the child, of thought.... Men are the slaves of words." This may have been true of the philosopher Kant whom posterity caricatured as a man "who was all thought and no life" or “a man who neither had a life nor a history.” I’ve come to the view that thought and action, two of the major facets of our lives, can not be separated. The practical and the mystic have become one in our day.-Ron Price with thnaks to David Foster, "Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and the Rhetoric of Agency," Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2001.
Poems of John Keats - Some Thoughts On Keats
I shall not die without hope, but....
I write with whatever passion,
tenderness, genuineness and
intensity I have been endowed,
tarnished as it all is by life's
walls of self and passion.
The rock of my days has a deep
moss upon it and great fissures,
some conglomerate, great chunks
from everywhere over long hauld
of time and their eras and ages,
their epochs and stages, periods
in some endless drift,some endless
fossil record which has only just
begun a biostratigraphy on its
mysterious, punctuated equilibrium.
Receiving feelings, as I do, within
a centre of wondrous reflection,
where I stand serene watching from
afar-off in a world of isolation,
where sometimes the barking of dogs
is loud on every side and sometimes
the Sun of Oneness shines---will my
shrouded soul ever unite with beauty’s
rose and that Stealer of all Hearts???
Ron Price
(with appreciation
to Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys)
Poems of John Keats - Some Thoughts On Keats
A CONGLOMERATE
John Ruskin writes about the theory and practice as well as the condition of the artist. He says that "those who have the keenest sympathy are those who look closest and pierce deepest." Those who "are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness of sympathy," those that possess the greatest intensity and genuineness, produce the highest art. Isolation and alienation, though, are, for Ruskin, the natural conditions for the great artist. He writes about the artist, Turner, who felt no one understood or saw the meaning of his work and, like all great spirits of the nineteenth century--Scott, Keats, Byron and Shelley--died without hope. Great artists, Ruskin continues, have to work at their art all their life and, perhaps, they will become 'a vehicle for truth'—perhaps. --Ron Price with thanks to John Ruskin in Ruskin's Theories of the Sister Arts, George Landow, Internet, 4 November 2001.
T.S. Eliot - T.S. Eliot
A poem which is often the first in a collection of T.S. Eliot's Collected or Selected Poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was conceived in 1910, completed in August 1911, the very month 'Abdu'l-Baha began His first Western tour. It was published in 1917 at the same time as 'Abdu'l-Baha was penning His Tablets of the Divine Plan. This work of Eliot could be seen in terms of a comparison and contrast with the Baha'i experience in the last eighty-five years. To put this idea a little differently, I could view my own life and the life of my religion and society in terms of the varied images and metaphors Eliot uses in his famous poem. -Ron Price with thanks to T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1988(1954), pp.9-15.
T.S. Eliot - T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot once defined tradition as "a way of feeling and acting which characterizes a group throughout generations; and that it must largely be, or that many elements of it must be, unconscious." Perhaps this is one way of summarizing the two century old tradition which the poet Roger White is a part of and that I have been part of in my lifetime within the Baha'i community. There is little evidence that White was ambitious to be a part of this tradition. There is in White's poetry little evidence of that attitude expressed by British writer Martin Amis that writers who mean business need to be ambitious and think they are the best.
Varieties of Religious Experience - is evil real ?
It has been overa year since your last post, Vern. I have not been back to this site since then and was not aware or your posts. Having read them, it seems tome you and i could easily get into one of those "casuistical" discussions. In discussing philosophy and religion, indeed, in many scientific discussions as well it is often difficult to avoid hairspiltting, as they say. Abdul-Baha refers to "natural impurities" such as "evil qualities: anger, lust worldliness, pride, lying,hypocrisy, fraud, self-love, etc.”(Some Answered Questions chapter 19)He also says: "The first perfection consists in cleanliness and sanctity and in purity from every defect. When man in all conditions is pure and immaculate, he will become the center of the reflection of the manifest Light. In all his actions and conduct there must first be purity, then beauty and independence. The channel must be cleansed before it is filled with sweet water." No more words allowed.-Ron
War and Peace - Tolstoi and Education
....error....should read..."for I know what life is like when this (not: one of these three) key ingregient(s) is missing.
War and Peace - Tolstoi and Education
In its scope, breadth and realistic depiction of 19th-century Russian life, this book stands at the peak of realist fiction. My world view is a Baha’i one, not the Baha’i one but a Baha’i one. the activity of the intellect and the senses, creative will and imagination has much to do with the world I see and live in. This is partly the romantic temperament speaking. The evil I see in the world is not so much due to stupidity, as Tolstoi saw it, but man’s lower nature which manifests itself in many ways of which stupidity is but one.Health is certainly at the core of my Weltanschauung, for I know what life is like when one of these three key ingregients is missing. For years, like Lawrence, Maupassant and Blake, I saw sexual love and the fuel of sexual activity as a sort of nirvana. Still, Tolstoi's emphasis on education to remove stupidity can take us a long way
Democracy in America, Book One - Tocqueville and Relationships
The fluid and impermanent nature of relationships with the minimum of formality that Tocqueville said characterized democracies were certainly part of these years in both school and in all the other aspects of life. Tocqueville's analysis said much about my time. The individual, he wrote, shuts himself tightly within a narrow circle of domestic interests and excitements and from there "claims the right to judge the world." As social, community, ties loosened, they became more impersonal, Tocqueville said, and "domesticity was reinforced."
Varieties of Religious Experience - is evil real ?
Having been exposed to this idea as a child and adolescent by a mother who was "into" C. Science, I am more than a little familiar with this idea..I am now a Baha'i and part of the Baha'i view is that: there is evil in the world. The true explanation of this subject is very difficult. The term "nonexistence of evil is used in a "specialized, technical sense." Any Bahá'í will be familiar with the analogies the Master drew. Ignorance is the want of knowledge. Forgetfulness is the want of memory. Blindness is the want of sight....So evil is the absence of good. The absence of a thing is "nonexistence" and therefore evil is "nonexistent." Yet, and this is the crucial point, nobody in their right minds would say that ignorance, forgetfulness, blindness, or death do not exist! So why would we say that evil does not exist?
This is a start to a comment on your post.-Ron Price, Tasmania