There has been a dark heart to my age and to my life; there were millions of "gray, silent rocks," a dreary and desolate scene, a vast, titanic, catastrophic tempest that "remorselessly gained in range and momentum" throughout all the years that this narrative of my life is concerned with. During these years "the queen of consumer durables," the term Martin Pawley gives to the television, became the principle assassin of public life and community politics. Between catastrophe and the consumer, Pawley puts it in colourful language, stands the goalkeeper, the person who brings you the news. "He will tell you when a shot is coming your way." While that may have been true in the broad arena of global conflict or even community crime, this goalkeeper did not protect me from the shots in a battle that was essentially spiritual and only partly within my control.

The difficulty, Pawley goes on, is that this public realm became less and less experienced and more and more reported on. The public realm became more and more complex in this half century. Or so it seemed. Affluence concealed the atomization and fragmentation of society. People's choices favoured privacy and anonymity over the very idea of community. Private goals triumphed over public ones. I liked Pawley's analysis when I came across it in 1975 while I lived in Melbourne and taught librarian technician trainees. His analysis still has relevance and so I refer to it here.


The origin of the vast upheaval which I have only briefly alluded to here has been the subject of unending academic and public discussion. It is a phenomenon that goes beyond demands for reform. Indeed, new vocabularies have been formulated to depict the crisis. The revolution is said to be "cultural." The challenge is said to be to the "quality" of life. The search is often said to be for "relevancy" or "authenticity." The picture is "postmodern" and requires "deconstruction." And on and on goes an endless analysis drowning the subject in a sea that few can swim in and even fewer want to swim in. However suggestive such terminology, such distinctions, may be they remain "tragically inadequate to grasp the reality of experience in these several epochs. The crises and tragedies I faced as a youth, in my marriages, in my jobs and my health were all part of the only real war in my life, the war within the individual and the news was like some kind of secondary reality with its tertiary battles and sound bites. These battles also had the effect, I am inclined to think, of limiting my accomplishments in life.

The characteristics of Thomas Edison, to chose one man to contrast my own life with in this regard, characteristics mentioned on the last page of his autobiography and ones which enabled him to accomplish more than most men were "a strong body, a clear and active mind, a developed imagination, a capacity of great mental and physical concentration, an iron-clad nervous system that knew no ennui, intense optimism, and courageous self-confidence." I had all of these things but they were not consistent and they were not always intense as they appeared to be with Edison, at least not from 9 to 60 and I do not anticipate that consistency will be an acquisition in my latter years. But, as Baha’u’llah states: some are endowed with a thimble-full and others with a gallon measure. Edison was without doubt a prodigy of work or industry; compared to him in the hard-work world I am a far lesser mortal, but so are most of us. I have lots of company.


The form and style of this work are not incidental features. A view of life is told. The telling itself, the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader's sense of life--all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life's relations and connections. "Life is never simply presented by a text," writes Martha C. Nussbaum, "it is always represented as something."

In the case of my autobiography, the Baha'i Faith is presented en passant in the context of my life and the society I experienced in more than half a century, 1953-2007. The Baha'i Faith gives to my mind and imagination as they body forth, or so Theseus tells us in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: "The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name." The mystery of existence, its paradoxical and complex form, is given "a local habitation and a name."


This modern age has seen a host of miracles partly due to the inventions of technology, partly due to the explosion in knowledge, partly due to the sheer expansion in population from less than one billion when these two manifestations of God were born to the present six billion. Whatever the case, whatever the reasons, however slow may appear the growth of this Movement during the half-century I have been associated with its expansion and consolidation, this Cause seemed to me to develop to a degree that, in many ways, far exceeded my expectations. This seems like a contradiction, a strange irony, but it is true, at least for me.