Encyclopedia of Death and Dying

[RonPrice]

DIFFERENT CITIES

The city is the embodiment of nightmare, of terrible visions, of some blank and dead spirit. Dostoevsky describes this urban jungle in a style full of life’s immediacy and authenticity, with a sense of the vastness and indeterminacy of human motivation. His writing career began after he gave up his ‘dull as potatoes’ military career in 1844.
-Malcohm Bradbury on ‘Dostoevsky’, The Modern World: Ten Great Writers, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1989, pp.27-52.

Attainment unto this City quencheth thirst without water, and kindleth the love of God without fire. -Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, USA, 1952, p.269.


It was a year when careers took epochal shifts:
exploring darkness and light,
old crimes and new punishments,
books, so many new books, that would
change the face of fiction and the world’s
spiritual sensibility forever.
Tragic figures, so very tragic, but
ultimately an exploration of the inner man
that the world had never seen:

Worship thou God in such wise that
if thy worship lead thee to the fire,
no alteration in thine adoration
would be produced.*

Different cities found expression under
your pens: heavenly and earthly,
earthly and earthly where, at last,
the Mystic Herald, bearing the joyful
tidings of the Spirit, shine(s) forth from
the City of God,** from Your book, like
some trumpet-blast of knowledge,
resplendent as the morn, awakening
hearts from the slumber of frenetic passivity.

And this city of multiforms is taking shape
up there, over there, like a pregnant mountain
and in a thousand other places, slowly,
gradually, confering new life on seekers
as they penetrate the hidden mysteries
of the soul and inhale the fragrances
of a new morning in some wondrous
utterances in which the channels of
their souls are cleansed by new perfumes.***

Ron Price
27 October 1995

* The Bab in Selections from the Writings of the Bab, p.77.
** Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.267.
***Dostoevsky wrote many books before he died in 1881.
The Bab and Baha’u’llah wrote a massive number of books before Baha’u’llah’s death in 1892.

[RonPrice]

I came across the following item in:

F. Dostoevski in "Dostoevsky and the English Novel: Dickens, John Cowper Powys and D. H. Lawrence," David Gervais, The Cambridge Quarterly,Volume 35, Number 1, 2006, p.52.
_______________
It is a solemn consideration that when I walk along the street in the small town where I live at night, or when I enter a great city at night when the traffic has died down and the lights brighten and soften the landscape, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest to it! In any of the burial places of this city through which I pass or in my own small town there lies a sleeper, a body, more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them.
_______
I included the above paraphrase of Dosoevsky...and went on to say:

In Shakespeare's play Hamlet the performance of thought, thinking, takes places in the form of inaction, of delay. The play is about a man who thinks. Hamlet's disposition to think and his indisposition to act, his intellectual activity and his aversion to action is at the centre of the play. We have here a man prone to thinking who seems incapable of acting and proportionally the more he thinks, the less he acts. Psychological readings of the last two centuries have blown plot and genre out of the critical waters. These readers have internalized the focus on character so that delay is not a plot device but a symptom of psychic conflict and the conjunction of tragic and comic heightens not social division but psychic conflict. This memoir is, in some ways, about a man thinking. This introspectivity to me, though, is but another form of action. As I see it, "we can no longer separate the active and the contemplative facets of our lives. Practicality and mysticism possess a oneness of vision and form." So too is this true of smooth surfaces and ruffled edges in life. They both can be pressed into cultural and autobiographical service and they are inherent parts of the warp and weft of one's life.

Poets and writers often interpret criticism of their poems, their works, as criticism of themselves. It is for this reason among others that I prefer a more gentle form of critique that the one taken up by Charles Dickens. He observed that criticism “means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots." Too heavy for me, Charles. The approach I take to criticism of others, and the one I would enjoy being taken to my work, is the one based on Matthew Arnold's precept of letting the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been much endeavor and little attempt at perspective. I have certainly taken much thought in creating and outlining a perspective on my life and this description of it but, as yet, I have not enjoyed the free play of other minds and their perspectives in any organized way. This is not surprising given the dearth of autobiographical writing in the Bahá’í community and the virtual absense of any formal criticism of it.---but the scene is changing--Ron Price, George Town Baha'i Group, Tasmania