Thread: J. D. Salingher Dies

You may find my writing a little too subjective, introspective. Like horeau I seem to be more interested in the natural history of my thought than of the bird life, the flora and fauna that I find here in Tasmania. I read recently that Thoreau took twelve years to identify a particular bird. I found that fact comforting. I understand, for I have the devil of a time remembering the names of the birds, the plants and the multitude of insects that cross my path and my horizon from month to month. But what I lack, what interest is deficient with respect to the various forms of plant and animal life here in the Antipodes, I make up for in my study of the varied humanities and social sciences. In the three decades of my teaching career I acquired, if I acquired nothing else, a passion for certain learnings, certain fields of study. My study is littered, I like to think ordered, by files on: philosophy, psychology, media studies, ancient and medieval history, modern history, literature, poetry, religion, inter alia. I move from one field to another from day to day and week to week and I can not imagine ever running out of gas, of enthusiasm, interest. Thus, I occupy my time. If J.D. Salinger is right in his claim that “there’s a marvellous peace in not being published”(1) it looks like much peace lies in waiting for me.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) J.D. Salinger in "A Review of the Book ' The 627 Best Things Anyone Ever Said About Writing,'" Deborah Brodie in BookPage, 1997.

Like Samuel Johnson’s dictionary published over 250 years ago, my memoir is an ambitious work. But whether it will influence future generations as Johnson’s work did, I can only hope. Johnson wrote, among other reasons, to escape the pain of life. I wrote, too, for many reasons among which was to escape society’s endless chatter because I seemed to have run out of social synergy to keep up the chatter beyond a modicum of it every month. Some may see my insensible and sensible exit from the social domain into solitude during the years 1999 to 2005, an exit from the extensive social activity that had characterized my life from 1949 to 1999, as "an inability to make the social adjustment expected of mature members of society." Such was the way literary critic Warren French described J.D. Salinger’s withdrawal from public life back in the 1960s. Still others, among the few who would concern themselves at all with my raison d’etre for writing as I myself do, might find my insistence on personal privacy difficult to understand; I experience a certain estrangement which inevitably results from withdrawal; the sympathy and empathy of others are sometimes experienced in smaller apportionments than once they were. Still others may hypothesize that I possess a hyperactive cortex or that I desire the same privacy and quiet that they too want in life. Although there are a few in my life now at the age of 65 whom I know who genuinely like me and even take the occasional interest in me, most people are simply too busy with their own lives, don’t like using emails or phones or don’t enjoy the advantages of propinquity in relation to where I live in northern Tasmania. Whatever people’s modus operandi and modus vivendi may be, I have freed myself, as I say, from most of that endless chat which for forty to fifty years, and with other factors of wear and tear, wore down the sinews of my soul and strained the nerves or, more likely, the chemicals, in my brain, making me desire a life above syllables and sounds if not words and letters, a life in which much is merged into nothingness before the revelation of a splendour the threads of Whose gold caught my eye and my ear over fifty years ago.

Unlike Salinger whose social and publishing history ceased at the height of his career, I publish extensively on the internet in the evening of my life. I have never achieved the heights of literary prominence neither Salinger’s heights nor anyone else’s—and I probably never will. In the last nine years I have published several million words on the internet. I engage in an extensive correspondence with the wider world via the internet, emails and letters. I have a more limited social involvement, not as limited as Salinger’s became, but certainly more limited than I had in the years of my life up to the age of 55. My quiet withdrawal is somewhat like the pattern of withdrawal and return Toynbee writes about in his A Study of History. It is a conscious intellectual and spiritual stance based on sober critical reflection and attention.

It is a withdrawal partly based on a fatigue, as I said above, with the social domain; it is partly based on the great religious event in my time--the growing influence of the prophetic figure of Baha’u’llah, an influence which is the most remarkable development of contemporary religious history--and my personal need to translate this development into some personal intellectual and creative response, a different response than the one that occupied me in varying degrees in the half century to the year 2000 and that engaged my life’s energies as a student, a teacher, a husband, a parent and as a member of community.
The psychic event that has given rise to this new reponse in the latter years of my middle age and the early years of my late adulthood had developed insensibly over decades. My watchful muse wanted to seize the fleeting opportunities of the hour and gain access to my mind and what seemed like divine or perhaps just obsessive promptings. Such promptings, divine and otherwise, were always difficult to define and assess. They were promptings that occurred to what had been my slightly and normally impervious, usually inhibited and fatigued literary and mental state, occupied as it had been with so many of life’s activities. But during the 1990s, as I began to psychologically wind-down from many of these activities, I experienced a release of energy, perhaps a ripeness of intellect, that was new, refreshing in some ways and required of me a new form in which to work. I felt capable of apprehending no more than a fragment of the mental wealth that poured into my lap as a result of the energies that had been created as a result of pouring over many questions energies that had been created as a result of pouring over many questions that had been generated by living for many a year.
------------------------------
WITHDRAWAL AND RETURN

Many writers, artists, poets, people in the world of culture and the arts, go into seclusion after their early successes. In a radio program today, Arts Today, two such writers were mentioned: J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. Others go into seclusion later in their careers. It is part of a general pattern which the historian Arnold Toynbee calls "withdrawal-and-return." Others call the axis along which specific changes or rhythms take place 'approach-and-separation.' Sometimes the artist will withdraw and never return. Sometimes he will return or approach in a more moderate way than he had originally. I have, recently, withdrawn or separated from quite an intense milieux of employment and community work and I have returned in a moderate way. Various factors predisposed me to go inward by the last years of my middle age, the years 55 to 60. This process of a withdrawal into solitude is hardly observable except to friends and relatives with whom one has some close connection by birth, by marriage or by lengthy association. In the case of J. D. Salinger it was observable because he had become a famous writer and the world wanted contact with a person who had become by degrees a recluse. Insight comes from an inner gestation, a Socratic wisdom associated with knowing yourself, a personal growth. Such was the view of Salinger. For Salinger this social reversal brought drama, change, intensification and new landmarks on a personal quest. It was a personal quest which ended today. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 March 2001 and updated on the day of Salinfer’s death: 30/1/’10.

Shocking public events
have inspired this poetic,
catastrophic happenings
to someone born in 1944,
to someone who tried to
find the Kingdom come
with power and has now
seen nearly half a century
of its slow establishment
around this global world.

Here are enough themes
to occupy time, energy &
the genius of a dozen men:
historians, sociologists and
philosophers—an inspiration
from another realm, a most
wonderful and thrilling motion,
fifty years of it, drying out my
intellectual eyes with a series of
barren fields and psychically
winding my mind with a new
fertility that surpassed all that
I had experienced in life, filled
my days with a revivifying breath
or I would have died in a wasteland
without a wimper amidst stony rubbish.(1)

(1) T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, line 19.

Ron Price
30 March 2001
updated: 30/1/’10