SOMETHING OF MYSELF

posted 2007 by RonPrice

I came across several aphoristic phrases in Kipling's autobiography. I post the following prose-poem linking Kipling to the history of the evolution of the values and beliefs-my religion--in my own life.

English poet and novelist, Rudyard Kipling died on January 18th 1936. A "new hour had struck in the history"1 of the Bahá’í Faith. A new stage was set, a stage synchronizing with the deepening gloom in the world. That stage was the devising, the inauguration, of a plan for the systematic spread of the Faith in the United States beginning in May 1936. The prosecution of that Plan began in April/May 1937. In March 1937 Kipling's autobiography Something Of Myself was published. The extent to which Kipling’s description of his life failed to match what actually happened is extraordinary.

In the first sentence of his autobiography Kipling said he was dealt a set of cards and he had to play these cards during his life "as they came." I could very well have opened my own autobiography published sixty-six years later with that same line. In the last chapter of his book he said that writing to him had always been "a physical pleasure."2 Writing became that to me by degrees, sensibly and insensibly. A preamble stage existed in the years of my childhood and adolescence: 1944-1962. From 1962/3 to 1972/3 I now see as stage 1 of my literary life; 1972/3-1982/3 was stage 2; 1982/3-1992/3 was stage 3 and 1992/3-2002/3 was stage 4. I have just begun stage 5: 2002/3 to the present. That sense of physical pleasure Kipling described did not enter my sensory emporium until stage 2. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Shoghi Effendi, "Cablegram October 26, 1935," Messages To America, Wilmeete, 1947, p.5. and 2Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Macmillan, London, 1937.

I came to the pleasure of ink, by degrees 36 years after you had left this mortal coil and that Plan had made an epochal shift. That pleasure served to keep me inside myself as it did you those many years--you with your daemon and me the leaven of that Ideal King and Educator.

We both enjoyed our trade tools-- books--Petrarch's friendly society found in a convenient chamber in a humble corner of our habitations and me taking delight in retirement's tranquillity by this river near the sea.

I was just getting going at last when you were slowing the pace,1 but for both of us writing was inseparable from our social, political and religious views reaching out to human beings.

1 Kipling(1865-1936) kept writing until the early 1930s, to the age of 65/6. In the previous ten years, from say 55 to 65, his pace began to slow. I was only starting to pick up my pace at the age of 55 after I retired from full-time work.

Ron Price 17 February 2007

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