Caring Today Community -

• My Story

This is a small section of my memoirs where I talk a little about my wife for whom I care-and she cares for me in a mutual disability relationship. I will write more on another occasion. This piece may be somewhat analytical for some and not anecdotal enough for others.
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My wife, Christine, has also not been well for many years since we moved north of Capricorn in Australia in 1982. The doctors do not know what the cause(s) of her physical problems is/are, but they are problems that make life difficult for her and our life together. Her symptoms include: dizziness, nausea, back-ear-and-eye ache, headache, among some two to three dozen or more physical difficulties. Sometimes she seems to recover for a time and have a good day or two, but then her symptoms come back. Some activities, involving as they would extended periods away from home would put a burden on my life and my health as well as my responsibilities to and care of my wife that would be difficult to deal with-to say the least.

Perhaps the one advantage my wife’s ill-health has is that it allows me to focus on her problems, to talk about her health, when the subject of ‘how are you?’ comes up in community life. This keeps the focus off of my own disability. Consequently, people have little idea of the physical problems I face and much more of an idea of hers. I don’t mind this for I am not particularly interested in talking about my disability, partly due to its subtlety and complexity. This has the disadvantage of people having little idea of the battles I face in my personal life. Not really knowing about my problems they often assume a capacity to engage in some activity which I simply do not have any more.

6. Concluding Statement:

This brief and general account summarizes both the long history of this illness and where I am at present in what has been a life-long battle. I think it is important to state, in conclusion, that I possess a clinical disorder, a bio-chemical, an electro-chemical, imbalance having to do with brain chemistry. The transmission of messages in my brain is simply overactive, irratic, inconsistent and causes me a range of mood disorders. One to two percent of the population suffer from this illness. The extremes of this illness are now largely treated by lithium carbonate and fluvoxamine, but a residue of symptoms remains which I have described briefly above.

The other factors that describe my personal situation I have also outlined and they need to be taken into consideration as well. Taken together I feel it is inappropriate for me to be involved in full-time employment or engage in demanding social activity. I have gone into the detail I have above because I wanted to give you some idea of the extent of this illness and its subtle and not-so-subtle affects. I really feel quite exhausted from the battle with this illness. I am still able to be involved in life’s many engagements, but in a limited way.

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In less than four years I will be 65 and will go on the Australian Pension. I have not worked in full time employment for more than six years for reasons associated with this illness. I have been on a Disability Services Pension(DSP) for four years. Although I have been treated for the worst side-affects of this manic-depressive illness, I have little energy, enthusiasm or capacity for full-time employment and/or tasks involving many hours of continuous and intense mental work and it is for this reason I have been granted the DSP.

My short-term memory loss often feels like the beginning of a dementia condition, although I had a memory test administered in 2001 at the Medical Services clinic in George Town and it did not indicate that I should concern myself with this illness. My wife, though, who knows me well and experiences the affects of this memory loss, has been very concerned and often frustrated by behaviour associated with my memory loss for several years now. All of this adds to my present incapacity and I feel you would be advised to have someone else…..

I trust the above outline provides an adequate information base for you to evaluate my situation. I apologize for going on at such length, but I felt it was essential to put you in the picture, so to speak. It is simply unrealistic for me to take on the task of……It would be too much, would be ill-advised and quite inappropriate given my present physical and psychological circumstances.
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To continue now with the general autobiographical narrative: Victor Turner, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, says we all have 'star actors' and 'star groups' to which we owe our deepest loyalty and which is the source of our greatest personal concern. These are the people and groups we identify with most deeply, where we find fulfillment of our social and personal desires. Inevitably, worth here is an entirely subjective thing. There is no doubt that the group to which such a loyalty has been a manifest reality in my life is the Baha'i Faith, although that loyalty did not acquire any strength, any force, any depth, until 1962. My consanguineal family, family of birth, while important to me until the age of 23, had a peripheral function in the ensueing years in physical terms, although their psychological presence will endure until the end of my life. The affinal family, the family I acquired on my second marriage in 1975, is now in its 30th year. These are clearly two of the 'star groups' in my life.

Even the most sophisticated scholars and critics tend to assume that consciousness enters history and takes up a definitive relationship with the world by means of the family. If I do not write about this family in detail it is because as an autobiographer I must be selective. Given this importance of the family, I do not write about it with the prominence that it deserves. I mention it casually from time to time; I mention individuals within it, but I do not go into the kind of detail and analysis that I easily could. Each family member has their own biography with its long history of relationships, ups and downs, job and health history, interests and activities. If I had the inclination I could devote its own chapter to the major and minor players in the experience that is my life.

The impulse to narrative, to tell the story of one's life, is natural. Everyone does it, although everyone might not want to write down the story for others to read. Narrative is there, like life itself. It's in our head; it seems part of our very feeling-structure, indeed of everything we are. Although talking about one's life is a pervasive presence in all societies, there is a powerful tendency to keep the painful, the difficult aspects of life, under-wraps. As Dame Mary Gilmore has written:

Never admit the pain
Bury it deep.
Only the weak complain
Complaint is cheap

Cover the wound, fold down
Its curtained place.
Silence is still a crown
Courage is grace.

The autobiographer must also keep in mind that narrative is not everything. There is much in life that does not reduce to narrative. When narrative is seen as everything; it is nothing; or as it is said in Latin: sic nulla omnia. However much one partitions, frames, contextualizes the background, the environment of life so that one can pick up the pieces and render one’s actions readable and understandable, life can not be held still. The complexity, the very pervasiveness, of it all, in the end, simply can’t be taken in. Writing is not adquate to convey experience and its elusive threads. It is for this reason that much that is in this text is analysis and commentary, not just narrative, not just constructed self-portrait. "The noblest goal of an autobiography," writes Graham Hassall, "is to examine one's life and to share the results of this examination with others." I was pleased to see the word "noble" in Hassall's phrasing. But 'noble' and 'ego' can occupy the same turf and probably do, inevitably, in autobiography as in life.

The famous economist and academic, John Kenneth Galbraith suggests that "the best place to write is by yourself because writing then becomes an escape from the terrible burden of your own personality." A certain tendency to playfulness in your attitude to your writing also helps to lighten this burden. Indeed, the process of writing autobiography helps to create a sense of calm out of the whirlpool of emotions, tensions and the blooming and buzzing confusion of life as I order and reorder it.

There are certain cerebral structures involved in autobiographical memory but they are elusive and seem to depend on the retention interval between encoding and decoding. The medial temporal lobe seems to be more involved in one's early years of life; whereas the posterior cortical structures are implicated in retrieving the most remote memories. In the last quarter century there has been extensive study of the human grey matter, the cerebellum, the neocortical structures; indeed, the human brain has been mapped and pulled and proded more than ever in all of history. The episodic retrieval of memory and semantic processing must take place, must be renewed constantly, ceaslessly but, even then writes Andre Malraux, you can not know yourself, grasp your life or tailor it to the world. The inner man, he argues, must be created but not around linearity which he says is an "artificial construct." There have been studies on recovered memories, on types of memories and false memory; the literature on memory is indeed burgeoning. My interest has not been so much in the anatomical and physiological processes in the brain, on types of memory and the processes of retrieval and so this autobiography has virtually ignored this subject, except for what I have said here.

It is generally an uncommon thing to go public with one's self-analysis. Such an exercise requires a rare exhibitionist drive. I have certainly done some of this exhibitionism in this autobiography and some 'other-analysis.' But, on the whole, I think I have kept it to a reasonable, a moderate, limit given the nature of the exercise which demands a certain amount just to get in the game, so to speak. Freud always said that "genuine self-analysis is impossible." I'm not so sure. But I think Freud was at least partly right. Given the complexity and difficulty of the task and given, too, that everyone engages in the process all their life, it seems to be inevitable that some self-analysis should be found here.

There is a sense of estrangement, of angst, of vertigo, of bewitchment, out-of-placeness which the therapy known as psychoanalysis, philosophy and/or religion seeks to overcome, revealing to us in the process of that therapy some of the organic, medical, psychological, sociological, philosophical and/or metaphysical dimensions of our difficulty. Given the fact that this earth is not man’s home but his tomb and that problems seem to be built-in to the human condition, a certain level of existential angst seems to be the sine qua non of our life on this planet. To put this another way, there is a density and irregularity to things with their distinctive, untotalizable tones and textures. To combine spiritual intensity with a certain laid-backness and casualness, a certain easy-going indifference which, in Australia at least, is at the core of the culture is not an easy combination of qualities to achieve. Perhaps, for me at least as well as many other artists, this contradictory polarity is best achieved in their art, their writing where their art engages with the world and provides others with an archive of the standards and criteria they need in order to narrate their own way in it.

It is the capacity of language to break down the visual, to break into the screen of images that makes television the pleasure that it is and that is the world we all see everyday. This same capacity determines how much of the historical period in the first six decades of the second century of Baha'i history(1944-2004) can be personalized in the life of one ordinary Baha'i who was granted the pleasure, the sensation, the talent, of writing, the same gift as that of any other unmerited grace.

Those who read autobiography often want to know, indeed their prime motivation for reading it is, what was the writer's "lived world" like. This 'lived world' in German is called our Lebenswelt. Our social world is our Mitwelt; our personal world is our Eigenwelt. The great events of history are part and parcel of each of these worlds. And our lives are lived through these events. A future history text book will condense these events into a paragraph or a chapter or even a book depending on the history book. Such a history text may end with 1844 and have nothing of the events of these epochs. The author may leave the years beyond that auspicious year of 1844 to yet another text.

Thomas Mann left behind him in his diaries "the most trivial events of his daily life." Even in his literary works he "skillfully concealed the autobiographical elements on which he drew so heavily." On the other hand I write little about the trivial events of everyday: what I eat, my sleeping patterns, where I went for holidays, if indeed I went on them at all, how I found the sexual act and who was 'best.' What I enjoyed in the cities I travelled through and details about whom I met and what they all said....and on and on through the interstices of daily ritual and routine that occupy most people most of the time. For the most part the random assaults of daily life are absent here but my narrative brings meaning to these assaults. The narrative, the poetry and the interviews, letters and diary each provide a conceptual entry point into the practices through which I made my choices, shaped my actions and helped me play my part in creating and fostering the new social movement that was the Baha'i Faith. Inevitably, there will be a tensional relationship between this book and the time, person and place it is read at some future time. And I like to think that this tension will be endowed with more meaning the way I play the strings of my life, leaving out as I do--for the most part--the daily trivia.

Some would have preferred to call the Baha'i Faith a new social or religious movement and not a world religion. Perhaps 'emerging world religion' was a happy middle ground. By the turn of the century the literature on new religious movements(NRMs), on collective action, activism and utopianism was burgeoning and it is not my purpose here to dwell on the academic complexities and nuances of terminology and the related issues. Suffice it to say that in the fifty years 1953 to 2003 that were my years of involvement with the Baha'i Faith it was transformed from an insignificant global group of some 200,000 to a small force of some five to six million. There were many ways of describing this process of growth but, again, that is not my purpose here. Each decade seemed to possess its own set of discourses for theorizing about these NSMs and the Baha'i Faith within them. In the 1960s the first wave of new social movements also saw a significant growth in the Baha’i community. This was followed by a relative decline in both NSMs and the Baha’i community no less.

Each decade also brought transformations in my own personal life. My days, by early March 1972, began to bring their own special promise. I was not yet 28. What I had done to bring this about, what alchemy I practiced, sometimes effortlessly but often in anguish in the years, say, since my adolesence in 1962 when my pioneering life began, I still find difficult to fathom and impossible to describe.

It has not been my purpose, either, to describe the originating conditions, the internal dynamics, the boundary structures, the external relationships and the everyday events that were, in their different ways, part of the history of the Baha'i Faith. This book is an autobiography not a sociological analysis of the Baha'i Faith. It has been to a narrative of my life that I have turned to make the incoherences of my life coherent, to illuminate the mechanisms at work and rationalize the aberrations, deviances and anomolies of my days. The collective action of the global Baha'i community was connected with my life and this autobiography has attempted to describe this connection. To the various institutional theories of mobilization my story might provide some useful data. But I will leave that to other writers. Readers who engage in this work in the future will possess their own predispositions, their own emotional attitudes and their own horizon of expectations and they will appropriate my work if they have any desire to imitate it, outdo it or refute it. "The coherence of literature as an event," as the philosopher Hans Jauss emphasized, "is primarily mediated in the horizon of expectations...of later readers." And so I leave this work in the paradigm of expectations of the future reader.

Identities emerge out of complex psycho-social processes through which the intimate sense of self is grafted onto group structures that are part of our environments. The construction of collective action is inseparable from the construction of personal biography, from the ways, that is, we experience our individual and social selves. This relationship is not a one-to-one relation that exists amidst the turmoil of our times. "All movement politics," writes Joseph Kling, "are identity politics in one form or another.....movements.....remain rooted in the biographies people make for themselves in given times and given places."

The educationalist, Jerome Bruner, says that narratives must answer the question "why is this worth telling?" Bruner says that one of the major features of western autobiography has been the highlighting of turning points. Turning points he writes "represent a way in which people free themselves in their self-consciousness from their history, their banal destiny, their conventionality." It is these turning points that are "steps toward narratorial consciousness." Unquestionably this is the case with me. Turning points in my life have been critical in the story I have just completed. "History is nothing but the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's mind," wrote R.G. Collingwood and the turning points in my life I turn again and again in my mind, re-enacting them, so critical they are in my story. For they are crucial to my history, my story.

I could have , for example, dwelt in much more detail on the days of my life before the Baha'i Faith began to seriously occupy my attention in or around 1962. For there were eighteen years between 1944 and 1962 with much that happened. But unlike the seventeenth century poet Henry Vaughan, I do not attempt to go back to those happy days; I do not regret their passing with any poignancy; I do not idealize them unhistorically. These sentiments of Vaughan are not mine:

O how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence the enlighten'd spirit sees
That shady City of Palm-trees.
......
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move.

I, like Vaughan, possess a nostalgia for childhood. It is a natural human proclivity to be nostalgic about one’s past. This nostalgia, in some ways, colours this entire work. As I indicated in the early sections of this autobiography, my childhood days were in some ways the happiest of my life. So it is that I often recapture those days in my mind's eye and relive them as my mind takes me back through familiar landscapes that I once travelled. I am only too conscious of the human tendency to recast one’s experience, revise, reorder, reinvent, revitalize the text of one’s life.
But unlike the archaist who wants to return, to swim, against the stream of life and go back to a society that has disappeared, I am not trying to reconcile the past and the present and the incompatibility of their competing themes and claims.

The impetus of life is moving on and, if I were to hold on to that past and its brittle construction it(or perhaps I) would shatter into fragments. Resuscitating the past in order to make the present workable is not my aim nor is it the task of the Baha'i community--although this resuscitation process is partly unavoidable. My task, our task, is not to perpetuate an anachronism and to see the traditional structures of power and influence continue in their tracks, rather my task and the task of my coreligionists is to plant the banner of this new Faith as far and wide as possible and raise up a new institutional Form on this planet. This is not as escapism from a disagreeable present, nor is it a barren quest for a goal which is intrinsically unattainable, though it often seems that way to critics who might accuse me and my fellow Baha'is of futurism. This activity of mine over these many years is no infantile desire to escape from reality, one of those besetting temptations of the human psyche; nor is it an attempt to shift from my shoulders the intolerable burden of being saddled with an impossible task.

This mundane scene, which I have observed and which we on earth are increasingly observing all over the planet, came during my years to be seen as a field for the progressive realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. It was and is a realization that was taking place during a social disintegration of vast proportions." A sense of unity," writes Toynbee, "is one of the psychological products of the process of social disintegraiton." A vision of unity grows, he goes on, as the reality of that unity continues to elude the storm-tossed wayfarers. And when, at last, the long-pursued goal is unexpectedly attained, the psychological effect is overwhelming."

Narrative, some argue, is the most powerful mode of persuasion. I hope so for this narrative of my life has not been written simply to move this keyboard of letters and keep me happily occupied in these early years of my retirement. The future of this literary work is simply unthinkable without the active participation of readers. Perhaps, as Auden once put it, "some great master generation" will later find an essential clue for solving some problem by reading this autobiography. So I like to think. After twenty years of working on it, though, I feel as if I have just begun to get a handle on the story, on the meaning. I do not feel the way Dostoevski did after writing his: "I shall never start writing my autobiography again, even if I live to be one hundred. You have to be too disgustingly in love with yourself to write about yourself without shame." For me, the experience is more like becoming pregnant with, and giving birth to, the self in writing.

I like to think that this type of material, retrievable in the future, will be highly suggestive. In piercing the perceptions of my own life I hope I have simultaneously given considerable and unexpected insights into such wider socio-cultural themes as Baha'i community life among the western middle class, its professionals, its idealism, its pioneers, inter alia, over several epochs of an importnat part of the evolution of a special commuity with a special part to play in the history of humanity.

Perhaps it would be timely to close this narrative and this analysis with more narrative and more analysis, narrative and analysis with a poetic edge that tells more in a few prose-poems than I could tell in pages of straight prose.

EARLY DAYS EARLY DAYS

The Golden Age of classical Greece and the Peloponnesian War in the last half of the fifth century BC offer some interesting comparisons and contrasts with the growth and development of the Baha’i community in the first half of the twenty-first century.
-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 5 January 1996, 1:35 pm.

They built some buildings while
they fought a war and the golden
age was gone.

We built some buildings while
we fought a war and the golden age
has yet to come.

The Athenians felt assured of triumph,
but it was a triumph that never came
as the Peloponnesian War ate away
their resources and their soul.

We feel assured of victory,
a victory that will slowly come
in the greatest spiritual drama
the world has yet seen.

Our Peloponnesian War
is at some distant hour.
Our Peloponnesus the
surface of the Earth.

What will be our Epidamnus?
Our Potidaea? Our Athenian
power? Our prelude to war?
Will democracy be acknowledged
folly* in a battle for survival
as the world continues its
transformative change?

These are yet early days.
These are yet early days.

Ron Price
5 January 1996

* Alcibiades described democracy as ‘generally acknowledged folly’.
-John Boardman, et al, editor, Greece and the Hellenistic World, The Oxford History of the Classical World, 1986, p.135. Many feel this way about democracy as we enter the twenty-first century.

EARLY PIONEERS

In February 1959, about eight months before I joined the Baha'i Faith, a plane crashed in northern Iowa with three of rock and roll's biggest names aboard: Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper. At the time this event decimated the then flegling rock industry. At the time I was in the middle of grade nine, played ice-hockey in the midget league and was probably still in love with Susan Gregory. This event was, then, on the perifery of my life in my mid-teens in southern Ontario. These rock heroes were some of the early pioneers in the rock and roll industry. Three years later I was about to become a pioneer, too, but not for rock and roll. This poem, a vahid, tells my story, at least some of it. -Ron Price with thanks to "Some Early Pioneers," ABC TV, 4:00-4:55 pm, 2 September 2001.

They were pioneers, these guys,
I remember their music well,
hits me now with a throb of nostalgia.

I was beginning to listen
to another music back then,
a music which won my heart
and soul, but more slowly,
insensibly, until I woke up
in 1962 not to The Beatles
who were taking the world by storm
and giving rock a fresh injection of life,
but to a new wind blowing
over sweet-scented streams
and I had become an early pioneer, too,
for the Canadian Baha'i community
at the close of the second third
of the first century of its history
in that favoured country
whose future was infinitely glorious.

Ron Price
2 September 2001

In 1962, on the eve of my pioneering venture I now see myself, looking back, very much like the way the great, perhaps the greatest English essayist, William Hazlitt described himself at the age of 19: "I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm, by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless." I'm not too enthusiastic about the label 'worm' but, relative to the transformation in my adult life, I can live with such a term to characterize me at the age of 18 or 19.

THE TURNING OF EARLY MIDDLE AGE

During the years when the Guardian served his stewardship of the Cause and the years of my mother's young and middle adulthood an insurance man gradually rose to prominence in American poetry. He did not really become central to American poetry, though, until after 1965. He was Wallace Stevens. He has been described as the successor to Whitman and Dickinson. His published works appeared in the years 1923 to 1954, the year before he died. Late this week, I think it was on the last day of autumn, I began reading a collection of reviews of Stevens' poetry. For the most part they were uninspiring, tedious summaries of some aspect of Stevens' work, but the review by poetry critic Randall Jarrell, a review of Stevens' Collected Poems(1954), was truly a mind-opener. In the course of a few minutes the poetry of Wallace Stevens unfolded to my mind and heart. This book of reviews was published the year I began pioneering, 1962. Forty years later this American poet, sometimes called 'the intellectual's poet,' 'the poet of ideas,' a poet 'above economic and political squabbles,' had become part of my consciousness. He was a man, like myself, who turned to poetry in his early middle age.

To Stevens the poet who mattered was the person who could "synthesize the sum total of his experience, even if only momentarily." Such a poet's "mastery" may have "Left only the fragments found/in the grass/From his project, as finally magnified." These words come from Stevens' poem "Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make Of It."1 Taking the world apart is an essential preliminary to seeing the world whole. Such is a very apt summary of my own poetic opus over the last decade. I try to see every fragment of experience as part of a whole. -Ron Price with thanks to Percy Hutchison, "Pure Poetry and Mr. Wallace Stevens," The New York Times on the Web, 9 August 1931.

So many of your poems, like mine,
are about poetry.
But I do not have quite the obsession
you have. I reveal much more about self.

I, too, seek the poem of the mind
in the act of finding what will suffice.
This was not always the case,
But has been since at least
That Holy Year1

Yes, the past became something
of a souvenir as the theatres
kept changing like some revolving door.
I had to construct a new stage
as I headed to the close of that
radiant twentieth century
with its darkest hours,
the great turning point
at this climacteric of history.

Yet another insatiable actor,
this one speaking words
in the delicatest ear of his mind
not always what it wanted to hear
but, yes, as an invisible audience listened
to him seeking some new satisfaction,
some rendezvous of his soul
with its Source amidst impurity
and a daily despair and, yes,
a celebratory joy:
it too in the act of the mind.2

1 The year I began to write poetry in earnest was 1992 after a slow warm up of thirty years, with the heat getting turned up about 1980 and getting turned up a little higher in 1987 at the age of 43.
2 This poem needs to be seen in the context of Stevens' poem "Of Modern Poetry."

Ron Price
2 June 2002

Perhaps the poem which follows should have appeared at the start since this is a poem about my first memory. So many of "memory's soft figures melt away" and "the beams of warm imagination play." But, wherever one begins one's story and however the story travels, Sir Walter Scott expressed in overview the nature of the exercise when he wrote that: "there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but it is a heroic poem of a sort, rhymed or unrhymed."

AN EARLY LANDSCAPE

The earliest moments, events, in the landscape of my memory seem to have an unusual clarity, as if they are scenes engraved on stone. It is not so much that these memories are soothing or particularly interesting, although I do find them so; rather, it is the place in memory where things start, the place of origins, or indelibly etched beginnings, domestic ritual's mysterious and precious beginnings. One describes and defines oneself in memory, in ritual's labyrinth of time. Identity is born, in part at least, in places like this: impressible, impressionable, fixed for life but changing with time's journey, changing right from the word go and yet curiously fixed. These memories become a part of life's grand ritual, repeated, gone over in the mind, a thousand times, and then some. In the years since these earliest memories, my moods have changed like the wind, like scenes a traveller sees from a train. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript of Poetry, 1999.

Perhaps it is obsession
that gives these earliest memories
their haunting elaboration
and effortless detail,
that gives that mud pie
its tidy, straight sides
on the edge of spring
with the snow melting*
beside the house on
Bellvenia Road in RR#1
Burlington Canada where
I lived as a four year old.

Memory is nostalgia;
it is ritual aesthetic,
intense and accurate
and my life’s start
inseparable from fancy,
the landscape of my imagination.

Ron Price
10 September 1999

* this was my first memory

But whether one begins at the beginning or ends with the beginning, readers will find in these five hundred pages of autobiography and analysis few if any references to politics, or should I be more specific, to partisan politics. "Everyday I am more and more persuaded not to meddle in politics," concluded H.E. Fox; "they separate the best of friends; they destory all social intercourse." So, opinions on the Middle East, on Viet Nam or the Iraqi War, on a world of issues that have beset the human community during these four decades, will not be found here. Rather I seek to present a deeper world where the whole of our selves, myself, or at least a significant part of myself, comes into play, where there is some triumph of the spirit in the face of private doubts and public rejections, far below the frustrations and the innumerable