I feel an immense kinship with that American philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, in so many respects. His hunger, as John Burroughs points out, was for health and the wild, wilderness, wild men, Indians. He felt close to "the subtle spirits" in this wilderness. He lived life delicately, daintily, tenderly. Burroughs said he was unkind. By contrast, I see myself as kind, one of the kind Canadians 'Abdu'l-Baha refers to in His immortal Tablets, although my affinity for the wild and the wilderness is clearly not as strong as Thoreau's. But I have his hunger, although it expresses itself differently to Thoreau's. It is an isolating hunger, as Thoreau's hunger isolated him. My hunger is not for health or the wild but, rather, for knowledge and civility.
When younger, until the age of about forty, I hungered for health. By my mid-fifties I hungered for solitude. In my late teens and twenties I hungered for sex. After working in the garden, I hunger for water. Since I eat a very light breakfast, by two in the afternoon I hunger for lunch. Our hungers change with the time of day and the season, with the stage of our life and our psychological needs. When I look back at more than sixty years of living there seems to be an element of wildness which I trust I have tamed significantly.
By my years of middle adulthood, forty to sixty, knowledge became, increasingly, my great desire, although I saw significant manifestations of this desire as early as the age of 30 when I worked as a teachers' college lecturer. By sixty the symptoms of my bi-polar disorder were, for the most part, treated. I yearned, too, for that quiet civility with which genuine engagement with my fellow men could be enjoyed when that engagement was either necessary or desired. Perhaps this was due to a fatigue with much conversation, my sense of an immense ignorance and my awareness of a strong strain of grossness and the many traces of moral laxity that not only stained my life but the name of the Faith I regarded as holy and precious.
As Shoghi Effendi stated so boldly at the start of the first Plan in 1937, "the controlling principle in the behaviour and conduct of all Baha'is" has implications for "modesty, purity....cleanmindedness ...moderation...and the daily vigilance in the control of one's carnal desires." Any thorough examination of the last fifty years of my life, 1953 to 2003, would reveal that I am far from casting that "sleeve of holiness over all that hath been created from water and clay." I see myself as modest but not prudish but, sometimes, modesty and moderation gave way to an excessiveness and a lack of control of sexual thoughts, feelings and associations. This is a separate subject I cover in more detail in my journal, my diary. But let me make a few general comments on the subject of sex here.
On the subject of my sex life I think I could put the matter in the same general context as Pepys and Boswell did in their now famous autobiographies. For these two giants of the autobiographical world, Pepys and Boswell, no seduction, no sexual experience, was complete until it had been recorded in detail in their diary. What is a complete account for me, of course, is in a class of its own and quite distinct from the accounts of either Pepys's or Boswell's sexual proclivities. My sex life, quite apart from my writing and the intellectual labor that has gone into it and however stimulating it may be to the reader, can be found revealed in my unexpurgated diaries published, if they ever are, long after my death. Much of my behaviour in life I would define as cyclical and repetitive. My dedicated toil in life, a toil that often led to successes of various kinds, was often followed by an orgy. But it was an orgy of exhaustion, depression, a deepening relationship with Thanatos and, sometimes anger, frustration and disappointment. This was not always the case, but to avoid these words would present a picture of my life far less than honest.
The record of my sexual life, however appetizing readers may find it, is remarkably thin on the ground. Readers should not get their hopes up too high as they contemplate reading my post-humously published diaries. To apply what I like to think are my customary powers of literary application to more than half a century of sexual activity with a thoroughness that leaves little to the imagination would require more space here, inspite of what I often felt to be an insufficiency of this erotic enthusiasm, than I really want to devote to the subject. From the observation of my earliest erotic desires in childhood, to the loss of my virginity in the arms of my first wife on my wedding night at the age of twenty-three, to my surprisingly late-discovered masterbatory abilities in middle age, my sexual exploits are given the kind of detail in my diary that would probably leave the most ardent voyeur unsatisfied, well, at least some ardent voyeurs. I leave my readers, the ones who acquire a taste for what I write here, with a reward at the end of the tunnel of my life. Stay tuned, your persistence may yield its just deserts. My sexual achievements or lack thereof, my career in fornication, like many of my forays into aspects of life’s burgeoning variety of pursuits and however stimulating they may be when well-written-up, will, it seems to me, in the end contribute little to nothing to my literary reputation or an understanding of the pioneering life. In my letters there is surprisingly little on the subject of sex, but the enthusiast who would seek out every jot and tittle on the subject—they will find their own reward. In the midst of the Parthian war Aurelius found time to keep a kind of private diary, his famous "Meditations", or twelve short books of detached thoughts and sentences in which he gave over to posterity the results of a rigorous self-examination. Others, in the midst of other wars, have also kept diaries. My war, of quite a different nature and occupying a period of some twenty-three years, resembles more the meditations of this ancient Roman emperor than the exploits of military people and their guns, swords and uniforms.
and gave up reading... 