The Education of Henry Adams and Me

[RonPrice]

is much more a record of Adams's introspection than of his deeds. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime. Adams concluded that his traditional education failed to help him come to terms with the rapid changes of his lifetime: hence his need for self-education. The organizing thread of the book is how the "proper" schooling and other aspects of his youth, was time wasted. His autobiography is a description of his search for self-education through experiences, friendships, and reading.

 

The Education of Henry Adams purports to be the autobiography of Henry Adams(1838-1918). It in fact records the author's struggle, in early old age, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition of his work printed at his own expense. Commercial publication had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. I won't go into the comparisons and contrasts between my work and Adams. I leave that to interested readers which they can read if they google: RonPrice autobiography.

 

But I will say, before moving on, that in the same way that Henry Adams' s life story is rooted in the 19th century American political aristocracy that emerged from the American Revolution, my story is rooted in the international Bahá’í community over a period of four epochs(1944-2021), a community emerging from a spiritual, a global, revolution that had been initiated by two-prophetic figures, two-God-men in the nineteenth century.

 

The essence of this revolution was the search for the unifying agent, the unifying catalyst, that would help the planet survive the tempest of our times. The context for this search was an attachment to national, racial, cultural, class and political loyalties and an almost deafening withdrawal and apathy. The revolution of my time was out of human control; the process was giving birth to humanity, to a world community, a global society. My role was to help in the extension of the model of world fellowship that had emerged out of that spiritual revolution of the century preceding my birth, a model that had been born in Iran and in North America.

 

Adams' book became an important and influential one in literary non-fiction in the next hundred years. It ranked first on the Modern Library's 1998 list of 100 best non-fiction books. It spread throughout America and the world in the years after the unveiling of the Tablets of the Divine Plan in 1919 and it is a useful comparison piece for this autobiographical work.

 

My poetry and prose is founded, as it was in the case of Walt Whitman, on the principle of language as ‘‘a source of renewable creative energy.’’ My works are best read in light of late-20th century and early 21st theories from the social sciences and humanities, theories I have alluded to in the text but will not attempt to summarize here. My broad aim has been, not merely to describe the objects of nature in the spectatorial fashion of a travel writer or scientific essayist....enough for now.-Ron in Tasmania