| |
Arts and Entertainment > Interview No.2: 9 Years later: Just The Preamble
0
Reviews [ add review ],
Article rating : 0.00, 0 votes. Author : Ron Price
The piece in The Harvard Advocate begins with a quotation from Daniel Boone and a short analysis of some of his life. I will begin my own interview here with this same quotation and story. –Ron Price with thanks to The Harvard Advocate(Fall 2004).
Curiosity is natural to the soul of man and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections. Their influencing power actuates, by the permission or disposal of Providence, from selfish or social views; yet in time the mysterious will of Heaven is unfolded and we behold our conduct, from whatsoever motives excited, operating to answer the important designs of Heaven. --Daniel Boone, The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone, Formerly a Hunter,” 1793(1784).
_________________________________
In 1769 Daniel Boone, thirty-five years old and already well-worn by two decades of frontier living, embarked on the journey that was to secure his place in American myth. To any sober-minded contemporary, his departure could hardly have seemed the most important of current events. In the same month, May 1769, the Virginia House of Burgesses would sign its “Resolves,” challenging the right of British Parliament to meddle in her colony’s affairs, with Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia to follow suit. Some distance east, Maria Bonaparte of Corsica was seven months pregnant with a certain future general; west, a group of Spanish missionaries had pressed through to the Pacific and, though besieged by locals, was nonetheless setting up the first Christian settlements on the Pacific.
It is unlikely that Boone was aware of these things in any explicit sense. He could not possibly have known how deeply the disquietude of the Virginia local assemblies would resound, the revolutionary rupture they would initiate. Still less could he have anticipated the influence the Corsican infant would have on European history, or the discord that democratic sensibilities like his own would inspire in France, before that infant should rise to claim it. Yet, at the heart of these axes or, if you would prefer, as one link of this extraordinary constellation, he pressed on through thick woods toward the Mississippi River.
Though it might seem strange to speak in sidereal terms of a man who these days is commemorated chiefly with plastic rifles and novelty mugs, his journey had profound implications. It was, for one, an act of political defiance: Boone set off in violation of England’s 1763 Proclamation, prohibiting settlement beyond the Appalachians, at the fore of the westward migrations that would have such profound effects on the development of his country. Further still, whether deliberately or not, Boone was a pioneer of pioneering—arguably the paradigmatic American mode of self-invention. With all the wonderment and pleasure of an actual return to nature, Boone would persist against hardship, a model of the self-sufficiency so praised by philosophes of the European Enlightenment. If Thomas Jefferson pronounced the moral sense more powerful in a ploughman than a professor, because the former was less likely to have been “led astray by artificial rules,” Boone was the man plunging determinedly ahead into the unmapped wilderness without precept or precedent. It is precisely his seeming inconsequence—or, at least, his marginality—on the scene of truly cataclysmic developments, that makes him exemplary of a particularly American heroism: individual, grassroots, democratic, or practical—call it what one will. Especially today, in a political climate begging for self-reflection and introspection about our origins, about the character and duty of our country to its own professed ideals and to a global community its founders could not have imagined—Boone appears as the prototype of the reflective adventurer, of a national character to which we often allude.
I: What is the relevance of this Daniel Boone story to your own story as a Baha’i pioneer?
P: There are several points of comparison and contrast, but two stand out. One is the climate of self-reflection and introspection about origins, character, duty, ideals and global community. My entire poetic opus is a tribute to these aspects of the Boone story. The second point I want to emphasize is the “truly cataclysmic developments” in both Boone’s world and mine. I certainly possess a “seeming inconsequence” and a “marginality.” Like Boone in these respects and like Boone, also, I plunge determinedly into the unmapped wilderness.” There is some precedent and precept in the writings of my Faith; I enjoy guides that Boone did not possess. He was a type of pioneer who had to invent and reinvent himself. I find him an inspiration in a way. He published his autobiography 200 years before I started mine, 1784 and 1984.
Interviewer(I): Ron, I’ve read in other interviews and articles that you grew up in southern Ontario Canada in a psychological landscape that was...no more room here
Article reviews
Post your review
[ Note : no HTML/URLs - will removed automatically ]
More articles from Arts and Entertainment
|
