RonPrice
09-11-2007, 02:21 AM
:cool:This poetry is written partly with the same hope of Herodotus "of preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done;" partly with the belief of Thucydides that this is "the greatest movement yet known in history;" partly with Tacitus’ sentiment in mind: "not to relate at length every motion;" partly conscious of the difficulty of the historian, namely, "combining truth-telling with story-telling;" partly surrounded by imperfect fragments, sometimes concise, sometimes obscure, sometimes contradictory;" partly on the basis of "a knowledge of human nature" and the operation of passion supplying the want of historical materials; partly with my own particular set of facts in the grand story; partly like Homer writing in an epic manner; partly with a style and vision that is personal and poetic and uniquely my own. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert Hutchins, editor, "History," Great Books of the Western World, The Great Ideas I, William Benton, Toronto, 1952, pp. 711-719.
You were a utopian, even then,1
about the same time I espoused
what many call a type of utopianism.2
You knew, even then, that
liberalism and socialism had collapsed3
as explanations
of our world and ourselves
and that the task of reason, our task,
was to formulate choices.
Well, I did, even then,
and my world, even now,
plays seriously with
socialism and liberalism.
I, too, was alone in my new politics,
but I found a fraternity
as I combined, as you did,
biography and history
in a sociological imagination.
1 C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford, 1959.
2 One of the critiques of the Baha’i Faith that I’ve had to deal with over the years is a view that it is a form of utopianism.
3 See Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian, NY, Free Press, 1983.
Ron Price
18 November 2000
You were a utopian, even then,1
about the same time I espoused
what many call a type of utopianism.2
You knew, even then, that
liberalism and socialism had collapsed3
as explanations
of our world and ourselves
and that the task of reason, our task,
was to formulate choices.
Well, I did, even then,
and my world, even now,
plays seriously with
socialism and liberalism.
I, too, was alone in my new politics,
but I found a fraternity
as I combined, as you did,
biography and history
in a sociological imagination.
1 C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford, 1959.
2 One of the critiques of the Baha’i Faith that I’ve had to deal with over the years is a view that it is a form of utopianism.
3 See Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian, NY, Free Press, 1983.
Ron Price
18 November 2000