Politics: Back To Bacon

[Ron Price]

This is not about getting more bacon from your politicians. It's about a wider focus than the everyday partisan politics:
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TOO HEAVY A WAY, MR BACON


He showed himself concerned in all that he wrote with choosing a context for himself which was the right one as he saw it for his constructive purposes. Human individuals are circumscribed, he argued, by time and place which condition the ways in which they confront and perceive reality. Choosing that context involves defining the perspectives, the basis, the meaning of the particular time and place of one’s life. Reading should have the essential function of helping us weigh and consider the multitude of questions that inevitably flow from, and are involved in, the definition of, this broad framework. Minds which are constitutionally unstable, or are lacking in a necessary unity and direction, or are temperamentally negative, or are easily distracted by the multitude of activities that are part of the traditional pacem et circenses can only choose and define this context after the briefest of considerations. -Ron Price with thanks to B.H.G. Wormald, Francis Bacon: History, Politics and Science: 1561-1626, Cambridge UP, Cambridge 1993.

That’s an awefully contorted way, Francis,

of saying that few be those that find their

way through the labyrinth, to the deep centre;

but I’m inclined to think that is not because

of all the learned books and volumes.

The true history of the spirit is found

in many ways in the simple, normal, natural

channels of the everyday and often begins

with a taste, a scent, a reminiscence,

memories and forgettings that need lips

and people who are willing to forget

themselves and the crude, vain, light

and imperfect thing that is opinion

and its mother, arrogance; she can grow

and be nurtured in the home of wonder

beside the garden of mystery, so that

sacred and resplendent tokens can attract her.

Ron Price

28 December 1996