So much of my life has been a 'life-in-community' that I thought I would give some of the last words on the subject to that brilliant tactician of the personal & interpersonal, 'Abdu'l-Baha. He survived a most difficult community and advised us on how to live in community in our time. Since our own communities have been, are and will be challenges for us to live in, this analysis of some of 'Abdu'l-Baha's final words before He passed away several years later will be timely. This section of my autobiography, then, will deal with biography, ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s treatment of the subject. "With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the compression of facts; with vivid images, usually not more than three or four pages as he discusses the life of each individual,, with a concision of explanation or commentary, with a specific point of view, a style of biography has continued from classical times into the twentieth century. This is biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the person over the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring the confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process. There is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or characterisation with facts teased, coloured, given life by a certain presentation and appraisal. Facts about the past are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette. They must be whipped up and played with in a certain fashion." -Ron Price with appreciation to Ira Bruce Nadel, “Biography as Institution,” Biography, Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66. Nadel, whom I quote in the opening passage of this essay, goes on to say that the “recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform." Freud said the recreation of a life, the getting at the truth of a life, can not be done; and if someone does do it, as inevitably biographers try, the result is not useful to us. People have been trying to write about the lives of others for millennia and, even if Freud is right, they will probably go on doing it anyway..

1. VOLUME FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
(Part 1)
As we approach the end of this somewhat rambling autobiography, the
inclusion of this essay seemed perfectly appropriate. So much of my life
has been a 'life-in-community' that I thought I would give some of the last
words on the subject to that brilliant tactician of the personal and
interpersonal, 'Abdu'l-Baha, who survived a most difficult community
and advised us on how to live in community in our time. As our own
communties have been, are and will be challenges for us to live in this
analysis of some of 'Abdu'l-Baha's final words before He passed away
several years later will be timely. This section of my autobiography,
then, will deal with biography, ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s treatment of the subject
and, then, a few brief notes of mine.
"A Study in Community," Pioneering Over Four Epochs," 2003.1
"With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the compression of
facts; with vivid images, usually not more than three or four pages, with a
1
This essay was originally written March 2000 and significantly edited in a second draft on May 2001
for the Baha'i newsletter ABS(English Speaking Europe) Issue 35. An important portion was added at
the end of this second draft after reading Derek Pearsall's comments on The Canterbury Tales.

2. concision of explanation or commentary, with a specific point of view, a
style of biography has continued from classical times into the twentieth
century. This is biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the
person over the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring
the confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process. There
is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or characterisation with facts
teased, coloured, given life by a certain presentation and appraisal. Facts
about the past are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are
an omelette. They must be whipped up and played with in a certain
fashion." -Ron Price with appreciation to Ira Bruce Nadel, “Biography as
Institution,” Biography, Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY,
1984, pp.13-66.
___________________________________________________________
____
Nadel, whom I quote in the opening passage of this essay, goes on to say
that the “recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and
difficult tasks a literary artist can perform." 2 Freud said the recreation of
a life, the getting at the truth of a life, can not be done; and if someone
does do it, as inevitably biographers try, the result is not useful to us. 3
People have been trying to write about the lives of others for millennia
2
Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution", Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press,
NY, 1984, pp.13-66.
3
Sigmund Freud in Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and Co., NY, 1988, p.xv-xvi.

3. and, even if Freud is right, they will probably go on doing it anyway.
‘Abdu’l-Baha gives the exercise a parting shot, to put it colloquially, in
the evening of his life, when He was in His early seventies.
His work,
Memorials of the Faithful, is squarely in the tradition Nadel describes
above: commemorative, didactic, ethical, psychological. His is a work of
art as well as information, a work of pleasure as well as truth. His is a
work of selection, as biography must be if the reader is not to be snowed
in a mountain of useless detail. He unravels the complexities of seventyseven lives and in doing so he answers Virginia Woolf’s questions: ‘My
God, how does one write a biography?’ and ‘What is a life?’ If one can
not answer these questions, Woolf wrote, then one can hardly write a
biography.4
The act of reading Memorials of the Faithful is an opportunity to see how
‘Abdu’l-Baha answers Virginia Woolf’s seminal questions about life,
how He answers them again and again in the more than six-dozen of His
biographies in miniature.
Biographers and autobiographers arguably
have one freedom, a freedom that overrides the genetic and social forces
that determine so much of human life. 5 It is the freedom to tell the story,
the narrative, the freedom to explain a life, any life, even one’s own life
to themselves and others the way they desire. This freedom is part of that
4
Virginia Woolf in Nadel, op. cit., p.141.
Arnold Ludwig, How Do We Know Who We Are? Oxford UP, Reviewed in New Scientist, 8
November 1997.
5

4. active force of will that ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote, in his pithy summation of
the historico-philosophical issue of ‘freewill and determinism,’ 6 is at the
centre of all our lives.
Of course, it is incontrovertible that what has happened in a life has
happened. There is no going back to change any one of the events,
decisions or results. Life bears the stigmata of finality in a certain sense.
There has been a relentless succession of facts, at once inflexible and in
some ways arbitrary. All story-tellers are slaves to these facts, if their
story is to enjoy the imprimatur of truth.
Charles Baudelair once wrote that a biography “must be written from an
exclusive point of view, but from the point of view which opens up the
greatest number of horizons."7 There are many ways in which one could
define the point of view in this subtle and deceptively simple book. The
point of view is that of a lover of Baha’u’llah, one who wants to be near
Baha’u’llah, one who wants to serve Baha’u’llah. The point of view is
really quite exclusive. All the men and women in this biographical potpourri were lovers of the Manifestation of God, the most precious Being
ever to walk on this earth, or so they believed, and they all had some
6
'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 1978, p. 198.
7
Charles Baudelair in Baudelair, Claude Pichois, Hamesh Hamilton, 1987, London, p.xiv.

5. relationship with Him during the forty year period of His ministry: 18521892.
Restlessness is a dominant theme, a strong characteristic, in the lives of
many people 'Abdu'l-Baha describes. They 'could not stay quiet', 'had no
rest', were amazingly energetic', 'awakened to restless life', 'plagued by
yearning love'. Nabil of Qa'in was 'restless, had no caution, patience or
reserve'.8 Shah Muhammad-Amin "had no peace" because of the love
that smouldered in his heart and because he "was continually in flight'. 9
This restlessness 'Abdu'l-Baha sets down among a galaxy of other
qualities and a multitude of other people. Some of the most outstanding
believers had this restlessness. Tahirih was 'restless and could not be still'.
Quietness is also valued highly. One does not have to be a great talker to
attract the attention of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Quietness also has its place in Baha'i
community life. There are people who are 'inclined to solitude' and keep
'silent at all times'. They possess an 'inner calm'. They are souls 'at rest'.
The gregarious types and the type who keeps to himself are part of this
quintessential dichotomy, a dichotomy that was as much a part of 'Abdu'lBaha's world as it is our own, although there seem to be a slight
8
9
'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, Wilmette, 1970, p.
ibid.,p.51

6. preponderence, a dominance, of the gregarious person. Ustad Baqir and
Ustad Ahmad both kept to themselves and "away from friend and
stranger alike".10 Mirza Muham- mad-Quli "mostly...kept silent". He kept
company with no one and stayed by himself most of the time, alone in his
small refuge".11 The more sociable type, like Haji 'Abdu'llah Najaf-Abadi
"spent his days in friendly association with the other believers." 12
Ismu'llahu'l-Asdaq "taught cheer- fully and with gaiety".13
"How
wonderful was the talk,"says 'Abdu'l-Baha of Nabil of Qa'in, "how
attractive his society".14
There are all of the archtypes that the various personality theorists have
given us in this century. In addition to Jung's introvert and extrovert,
there is the artist, the suffering artist-soul within us all, Mishkin-Qalam.
He survives in all his seriousness, as we might, with humour. There are
the types who William James describes in his Varieties of Religious
Experience: the personality constitutionally weighted on the side of cheer
and its opposite, the somber, more reflective even melancholic type. The
two carpenters, Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad were examples of the
former.15 The examples we find of the latter were often the result of the
10
ibid., p.46.
ibid., p.73.
12
ibid.,p.71.
13
ibid.,p.6.
14
ibid.,p. 53
15
ibid.,p.73
11

7. many difficulties these lovers of Baha'u'llah were subjected to and it wore
them "to the bone."16
‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while He
describes many of those He came to know in His life.
For He is
describing not only the lives of these men and women in the nineteenth
century, He is describing us in our time. He is addressing us on our own
travels. He addresses the restlessness in us all. He speaks to us in our
victory and our loss. He speaks about what Michael Polanyi calls the
tacit dimension, the silent root of human life, which is difficult to tap in
biographies, the inner person. This private, this inner person, is the one
whom He writes about for the most part. He sets this inner life in a rich
contextualization, a socio-historical matrix.
He describes many
pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct our own. We all must
shape and define our own life. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Intellectually
provocative? Spiritually challenging? ‘Abdu’l-Baha shapes and defines
these lives given the raw-data of their everydayness added up, added up
over their lives as He saw them. How would He shape my life? Yours?
How would we look in a contemporary anthology of existences with
‘Abdu’l-Baha as the choreographer and the history of our days as the
mise en scene?
16
ibid.,p.96.

8. Some of the lives of the obscure, the ordinary and representative
members of the Baha'i community are recovered for history and for much
more. Their private aspirations and their world achivements, their public
images and their private romances, their eventual successes and their
thwarted attempts are lifted onto the pages of a type of Baha'i scripture.
'Abdu'l-Baha is setting the stage, the theatre, the home, in these pages, for
all of humanity. The extrovert is here, the introvert, those that seem
predisposed to cheerfulness and those who seem more melancholy by
nature. All the human dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come
across in my own journey. They are the characters which are part and
parcel of life in all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past, present
and, more importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it, the rag-andbone-shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the text and texture of
community as we all experience it in the crucible of interaction. It is
somewhat ironic that the host of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s contemporaries that we
find here were resurrected and for us, found, at a time when the lost
generation between 1914 and 1918—were getting lost in the trenches of
Europe.
Memorials of the Faithful is what might well be this age’s Canterbury
Tales, that compendium of personalities who exemplify, as William

9. Blake once put it, “the eternal principles that exist in all ages.”17 We get a
Writer Who delights in other people but Who has an active and incisive
mind, a practicality that He brings to bear on what are often difficult
personalities. He dwells only on the essentials; His purpose is inveterate;
His feelings sincere and intense; they never relax or grow vapid during
His cursory analyses. He is exquisitely tender, but clearly wily and tough
to survive in the burly-burly life of exile, prison and the unbelievable
difficulties He had to bear along life’s tortuous path.
Interest in biographies of Baha’is in the 19th century Iranian Bahá'í
community is not exactly a booming business these days. But that time
will come sensibly and insensibly in the decades ahead as this new world
Faith comes to play a critical part in the unification of the planet.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s work is more than a little prescient.
The heroic age was coming to a close when ‘Abdu’l-Baha put His pen to
paper; and it was over by the time the Haifa Spiritual Assembly published
this His final book.18 A remanant remained, Baha’u’llah’s sister, the
Greatest Holy Leaf who died in 1932. ‘Abdu’l-Baha had played a
prominent role in the epic that was the heroic age. He played a dominant
role in writing that epic’s story. Memorials of the Faithful is an important
17
William Blake in Geoffrey Chaucer: Penguin Critical Anthologies, editor, J.A. Burrow, 1969, p.82.
If one considers the Tablets of the Divine Plan a book, then Memorials of the
Faithful was 'Abdu'l-Baha's penultimate book.
18

10. part of that epic. This epic tradition was not essentially oral but
quintessentially written: a written tradition par excellence. Since The
Growth of Literature by the Chadwicks(1924-1926) the heroic epic has
been seen in literature’s epic studies “as a cultural rather than a literary
phenomenon.”19
The Baha’i epic has grown out of a complex and
fascinating set of cultural conditions. Indeed ‘Abdu’l Baha’s work has
contributed to the resolution of problems involving the relationship, the
transition, between oral narrative and written text. But this relationship is
a question to occupy epic enthusiasts and is not our principle concern
here.
Within three to four months of completing this last of His books,
‘Abdu’l-Baha had begun His Tablets of the Divine Plan 20, the action
station within which the community He was addressing could put into
practice all the good advice He had given it in His Memorials of the
Faithful. Like The Will and Testament, though, it may take a century or
more to grasp the implications of this surprisingly subtle and, deceptively
simple, book.
19
Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, editor, Felix J. Oinas,
Indiana UP, London, 1978, p.1.
He began writing His Tablets of the Divine Plan on March 26th 1916; Balyuzi
informs us in his biography of ‘Abdu’l-Baha that He worked on Memorials in the last
half of 1915(p.417).
20

11. In the next two decades we shall see the end of the first century of the
Formative Age. Perhaps the time has come to begin to seriously grasp
the implications of these shining pages from ‘Abdu-l-Baha and His
interpretive genius.
We do not know much about the circumstances of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s
writing, at least I don’t. Some writers we know, like Beethoven, are
intensely physical people who seem to fight their thoughts onto the page,
splattering the ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper in the process.
Beethoven had none of the serene penmanship of a Bach or the hasty
perfection of Mozart or the quasi-mathematical constructs of Webern. But
we do know some things. We know, for example, that ‘Abdu’l-Baha
often worked all night with a large part of the night devoted to prayer and
meditation. It was then He did His writing; He was too busy to scribble
down things in the daytime as some writers do. He had a short sleep after
lunch. After writing one of the biographies he would often read or tell the
story at one of the meetings in the next few days. Now, we can read them
in a book or access them on the internet, in very readable English, in
authorized translations. Gone is the Persian and Arabic in which He
wrote; gone is ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s innimitable script or that of one of His
secretaries. Having flashed onto the screen with the speed of light or into
the book in some electronic form with every character proportional, every

12. paragraph in alignment, these words, written six years before His passing,
are now free to penetrate our own lives as the lives He wrote about
penetrated His.
FOOTNOTES
The material on Chaucer that follows was obtained from Derek Pearsall's
The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography, Blackwell, Oxford,
1992, pp. chapter 6. The following is not a quotation.-Ron Price,
Tasmania
The whole organization of Chaucer's narrative is in the historical latticework of a world of ecclesiastical routines and needs. 'Abdu'l-Baha's
narrative, played as it is in the lives of seventy-seven souls, exists in the
interstices of lives transformed by a manifestation of God. Instead of the
ubiquity of the Christian Faith and its practices we have a new religion
emerging in the soil of people's lives. Both books give us a narrative of
faith. Women are dominant in Chaucer and men in Memorials of the
Faithful. Both books provide us with a spiritual journey. There is a gusto
and carnivalesque spirit, a contempt for marriage and sexual urges, in
Chaucer while none of this is to be found in 'Abdu'l-Baha's work.
There is no sense of social and moral commitment in Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer's London is a turbulent and dangerous place; so too in 'Abdu'lBaha'is world. He writes of the domestic world rather than the politics of

13. power. Both men possess a remarkable acuteness of observation; there is
little of the sense of outrage. Chaucer makes a magpie-like raid on
scholarly texts, perhaps more from conversations. The pilgrims are
infinitely various.
The sense of dramatic vitality is so strong the
temptation to read the tales as principally an expression of the characters
of their tellers is strong.
Chaucer is a self-concealing and evasive character. This father of English
poetry is a figure who eludes the biographer's grasp even more fully than
Shakespeare. There are no private letters or journals, no anecdotal
reminiscences of friends, and precious few autobiographical clues in the
poems themselves. The tools for understanding Chaucer are literary
history, philology and the history of patronage and court politics in the
14th century. These disciplines need to be part of a biographer’s strong
suit if he or she is to excel in their recreation of Chaucer’s life. In dealing
with the life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá none of these problems exist for the
biographer.
Chaucer’s audience in the imagination is "a miscellaneous company, of
lettered London men, to be appropriately scandalized and delighted by
the Wife of Bath and the fabliaux, flattered by the invitation to share in a
gentleman scholar's easily carried burden of learning and intrigued by the

14. novel expose of London low life in the Cook's Tale. The audience is,
probably exclusively an audience of men.
‘‘Abdu’l-Bahá has no
audience until 1928 more than a decade after He has finished writing the
book.
A mission to Genoa and Florence on the king's service in the early 1370s
was especially important for Chaucer’s poetic development because it
gave him the opportunity to discover the riches of Italian literature.
Fifteen years later he began writing The Canterbury Tales his maturer
reflections upon the life of men and women in society and in the
Christian faith. They were written in the last dozen years of his life,
1387-1400.
He was almost entirely occupied with writing 'The
Canterbury Tales' in these last years.
For Chaucer poetry was an accomplishment and a vehicle for selfdisplay, a means for his advancement at court rather than an activity of
his profession. His poetry benefited his career and vice-versa: his earlier
works, coinciding with his French connections, were influenced by
French poetry, notably the great allegorical love vision of the Roman de
la Rose, while his middle period, inspired by the Italian journey, was

15. dominated by his version of the Troilus and Cressida story, written in
imitation of Boccaccio's treatment of the same subject.21
He refrained from direct allusion to public events and it is difficult,
unsafe, to make any deductions about specific connections between his
life, his works and the events of the time. Some scholars prefer to see his
work as chaotic and inexplicable.
The comparisons and contrasts with the work of 'Abdu'l-Baha make a
fascinating study to those interested in both Chaucer and the Baha'i Faith.
But even those who hold no particular interest in Chaucer can find the
contrasts and comparisons valuable in helping them understand the work
of this Central Figure of the Baha'i Faith writing as He was at the very
beginning of the Lesser Peace and the new Age the world was entering in
all its tragic swiftness, amazing perplexity and fascinating juxtapositions.
In my nearly fifty years of pioneering and sixty involved as I have been
in the Baha'i community, I find this seminal work of 'Abdu'l-Baha’s
absolutely crucial in my attempt to understand and deal with the
complexities and problems that arise in Baha'i community life. It is as if
'Abdu'l-Baha has given me the Baha'i community in microcosm.
Jonathan Bate, “Slim Biography and Slim Pickings: A Review of Peter
Ackroyd’s Chaucer,” Telegraph.co.uk, 29 March 2004.
21

16. Although He wrote the book nearly a century ago, it speaks to me about
my life and so I pass the dialogue I have had with this book to you, dear
reader….and a final word on Chaucer….
NO STRUGGLE TO INVENT
Chaucer had a simplicity and directness of style. He was able to step into
a child’s mind and an adult’s; indeed, he could take on the life, the mood
and the personality of anyone or anything he knew or could know. That is
the basis of the vividness, the individuality of his characters. He pleads
authenticity, faithfulness to actual life and speech.
-Ron Price with
thanks to Collier’s Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.
Oh Father of English poetrythe King’s English-when English
was finding its East Midland dialect
and first being used in Parliament,
some six hundred years ago1, whose
poetry was in the language of the manin-the-street, with simplicity, naturalness,
freshness and vitality—which we have
recently rediscovered in our time and
which I strive for in my poems and in
what I write of history and character in

17. my pioneering tale, pilgrimage-like across the
world, painting some realistic portraiture, with
no struggle to invent, only to suit my purpose.
1
George H. McKnight, The Evolution of the English Language: From
Chaucer to the Twentieth Century Dover Publications Inc., NY,
1968(1928), p. 18.—25/5/97.
__________________