.......a morally and spiritually bankrupt society, now hovering on the brink of self-destruction.-Shoghi Effendi, April 1957.
William Faulkner represents concretely the deterioration of American life and those institutions and values which allow for the cultivation of the imagination and the spirit. Faulkner�s judgement is that our culture has been devastated from within by its own values. The founding fathers hadn�t found freedom of thought, but had found the freedom to be incorrigible and unreconstructible. They did not so much escape from tyranny as establish one. -Steven Marcus, �Snopes Revisited�, Representations: Essays on Literature and Society, Columbia UP, NY, 1990(1975), pp. 28-40. This article is about Faulkner�s The Town, NY, 1957.
April 21st 1957
Being as I was on the edge of adolescence
I had little appreciation of any deterioration
for I had not been �round long enough to assess
the state of affairs as Faulkner or he saw them,
as he put it in this last Ridvan message.
I didn�t read books much then, anyway, and
the Baha�i Faith had only just stuck its head
above the ground in my life making Shoghi
Effendi a strange name, far too strange a name
to put on a baseball card or even to have in your
classroom, at the back where the strange kids sat.
I won a public speaking prize that year on a
talk written by my mother, but noone knew;
I was in love with Carol Ingam and she knew,
but it was of no use to me as I started spring
training and went to my first firesides with
some people I had always thought were a little
strange, but later realized we all were, then and now.
I later read Mr. A. Herzen* who told me people
then, in 1957, ran away from thinking, had a
convulsive craving to be busy, to be distracted,
sought forgetfulness, a superficial propriety and
lacked ways to express their deepest suffering.
Then, just before the Guardian died the first
music video was made staring Elvis Presley**
and rock-and-roll began to wake us up from our
day dream of Mr. Clean, Doris Day, General Ike,
luxury without stress, African-Americans or genitalia.
And we woke up in the sixties to a dark heart
of an Age of Transition and a new dream, a
new age of science, space and sperm which
got us into a lot of trouble. It was an age of
movements, utopias and the slow growth of
a prophetic Force with a crucial role to play
in the future of humankind.
Ron Price
4 May 1996
* A. Herzen in: The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, Doubleday and Co. Inc., NY, 1977.
** Jailhouse Rock
