GOING THE DISTANCE
I prefer to view Conrad�s marriage as really a means toward his major and dominant preoccupation: to establish the best terms on which he could continue as an author.
-Frederick J. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. A Biography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1979, p.367.
The real movers of society maybe not the thinkers and actors on the real stage of the world, but the comparatively insignificant members, those who contribute to what she calls �light literature� including her autobiography. -Helen Thomson, editor, Catherine Helen Spence, University of Queensland Press, 1987, pp.490-491.
When I was in that phone box
back in �75 and I had to decide
I saw you as the best terms
on which I could continue
my religious enthusiasm
without obstruction.
That had always been
my dominant preoccupation.
That was the most important
decision of my life, as it turned
out�.or one of them.
Of course, there were other
considerations like:
�I�d be good for you� and
�you�d be good for me�
which one could put in so many ways.
And you have and I have
and here we are twenty years
later in �95 with our religious
enthusiasms in place and,
all being well, we should go
the distance, of course,
one never knows for sure.
Ron Price
5 October 1995
