Pushkin, Samuel Johnson and Me: Notebooks

[RonPrice]

1817: A BIG YEAR
FOR NOTEBOOKS

I have come to see my own notebooks as a genre of my writing which began in 1953 when I was in grade four. The selection of this date is partly due to its significance in the Baha’i timeline of significances and partly due to grade four being the half-way point in my primary education. I had had four years of schooling by then and I’m sure I had notebooks in those first years 1949 to 1952. The first notes that I kept and which I still possess came from 1961/2, but the vast array of notebooks I have now collected comes from the period 1974/5 to 2004/5. The conscious collection of notes into notebooks was an even more recent phenomenon. Looking back I see the years 1980 to 1995 as a time for their early development, an insensible process that is difficult to define in any clear way. But by the late eighties the process of gathering notebooks was a quite conscious one with an increasing articulation of their role in my writing in the years 1995 to 2005.

Reading about the origins and development of Pushkin’s(1799-1837) notebooks which he collected in the last two decades of his life, in the years 1817 to 1837, made me reflect on my own. Pushkin carried his notebooks around with him while he was in exile in the 1820s. Mine have simply been relocated by moving companies from Katherine in the NT to South Hedland and then to Perth in Western Australia and finally to George Town Tasmania. Mine now occupy space in an orderly fashion in my study to draw on in my writings and be updated from time to time from (a) my writing, (b) photocopied material and (c) internet information on a host of topics.

Pushkin’s notebooks came to occupy 8 volumes and were first published in 1994, 157 years after his passing. I have no idea whether mine will ever see some published form; I leave that to those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence. At this stage, after only 10 years of conscious, formal, organized notebook collecting, I have trouble seeing their long range significance.

Each page of Pushkin’s notebooks is reproduced in colour and are now seen as an important part of Russia’s heritage. Many pages of the originals are deteriorating. Who knows what significance will be seen in the pages of my manuscripts coming as they do from the 3rd to 5th decades(1983-2013) of the tenth and final stage of history, the fourth and fifth epochs of the Formative Age(1986-2021), the second half(1987-2037) of the first century(1937-2037) of the formal implementation of the Tablets of the Divine Plan? It is possible than nothing will come of them but, circling around some of the great writers of modern history as I do, it gives me pleasure to make comparisons and contrasts.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, August 11th, 2005.

Your first notebook began
in the year that the most precious
Being to have ever lived
drew His first breaths in Tihran
near the Shimran Gate where
He lived in the house of Mirza
Buzurg where He never cried,
was never restless-so they say.

Descended from Abraham
and a Sasanian monarch,
the son of Khadijih Khanum
and Mirza Buzurg this Man,
this great God-Man
of the 19th century
began an undertaking
that has captured the imagination
of several million people
and is associated with those
climactic changes in direction
in the collective history of man.

August 11th 2005
______________________
INCIDENTS OF A VOLATILE/EVANESCENT KIND

My attitude to books and notebooks is not unlike that of Samuel Johnson(1709-1784) an important literary figure who produced an English dictionary in 1755, the most significant and useful one until the Oxford English Dictionary came out in 1911. Books, to Johnson, were for use not for adornment, not for sacred and reverential treatment. His sanctum sanctorum, his library, his biographer Boswell wrote, “was strewn with manuscript leaves, with books in great confusion” when he chanced by for a visit. And so is this the case with my books and notebooks should a casual observer catch me in the middle of my research and writing. My notebooks and books are full of handwriting, underlining, notes in the margins, indeed, notes in many places in the books. My files and notebooks often lay all over the floor and the furniture. This is not true all of the time and of all my books, but it would take too long to provide a detailed description of this heterogeneous, this varied and complex process. Needless to say, I share some of the features of Johnson’s attitude and policy with respect to books and notebooks.

This disorderliness, this apparent clutter and chaos, which Boswell observed in Johnson’s library, is sometimes observable in mine when I am caught in the midst of my work, my writing and research. At most times, indeed all the time when I am not writing, I keep everything in its place in this small study here at Port Dalrymple on the south side of George Town the oldest town in Australia and located as it is in northeast Tasmania. My notebooks, my books, my manuscripts and papers, my files, my stationary and various items of writing and reading equipment all have their place: labelled, ordered, tidy, dusted and ready for use. –Ron Price with thanks to Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson, Princeton UP, 1987.

Such a grand composition,
mingled as it was with
all the shades, peculiarities
and blemishes that flesh
is ere to, all the fertility
and readiness, dexterity,
wit, vigour and vivacity,
the extraordinary endowments
and particulars of his own mind--
such was the person who laid out
all those notes on the lives of others1
sometimes on the floor and disarray.

1 Ron Price with thanks to Boswell's Life of Johnson, Front Matter, Editor, Jack Lynch, Oxford, 1904.
"The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies and display the minute details of daily life. Here exterior appendages are cast aside and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue.……These narratives are often written by those who are not likely to give much instruction or delight. Most biographical accounts of particular persons are barren and useless……The incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.”1
"Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges or the most important battles." Plutarch, Life of Alexander, Langhornes's Translation. -8/24/ ’05.
_____________________________
That's all folks! SeeyalateRon.......