English poet and novelist, Rudyard Kipling died on January 18th 1936. A "new hour had just struck in the history"(1) of the BaháÂí Faith. A new stage was set synchronizing with the deepening gloom in the world. That stage was the devising, the inauguration, of a plan for the systematic spread of the Faith in the United States beginning in May 1936. The prosecution of that Plan began in May 1937. In March 1937 Kipling's autobiography "Something Of Myself" was published. The extent to which KiplingÂs description of his life failed to match what actually happened is extraordinary. This is of interest to me because I have been working on a 2500 page autobiography or memoir.

In the first sentence of his autobiography Kipling said he had to play the cards in his life "as they came." I could very well have opened my own autobiography published sixty-six years later with that same line. In the last chapter of his book he said that writing to him had always been "a physical pleasure."(2) Writing became that to me by degrees, sensibly and insensibly. A preamble stage existed in the years of my childhood and adolescence. From 1962/3 to 1972/3 I now see as stage 1; 1972/3-1982/3 as stage 2; 1982/3-1992/3 as stage 3 and 1992/3-2002/3 as stage 4 and 2002/3 to the present as stage 5. That sense of physical pleasure did not enter my sensory emporium until stage 2 in the early 1970s.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)Shoghi Effendi, "Cablegram October 26, 1935," Messages To America, Wilmeete, 1947, p.5. and (2)Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Macmillan, London, 1937.

I came to the ink,

by degrees and with

pleasure 36 years

after you had left

this mortal coil, but

it served to keep me

inside myself as it did

you those many years--

you with your daemon

and me the leaven of

that Divine Educator

in a quite mysterious

process I shall never

understand or describe.

We both enjoyed our trade

tools--books--Petrarch's

friendly society found in

a convenient chamber in

a humble corner of our

habitation and taking delight

in retirement's tranquillity and me

by this river not far from this sea.

I was just getting going when

you were slowing the pace,1

but for both of us writing was

inseparable from our social,

political and religious views.

1 Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, to the age of 65/6