Ron Price
Mr RonPrice
This is not about getting more bacon from your politicians. It's about a wider focus than the everyday partisan politics:
____________________
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
____________________
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