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SUMMARY: I may have jumped around in setting up this series of instalments. But, if you are patient--and more importantly--if you enjoy the story---it won't matter.

Most of life's experience has been left out, as Mark Twain informed us is an inevitability, part of the nature of any autobiography. Perceptual gaps, cognitive omissions, lacuna of many kinds, prevent an accurate or complete account of reality. But, because we are seldom aware of the lacuna, because the neural processes, the neurophysiological data underpinning autobiographical memory, the cerebral representation of one's past is difficult to elucidate and difficult to tap, we tend to believe the cognitions.

Clocking in at a burgeoning 850 pages, as I place these additional words, is too much. If that is the case, some future editor can cut it back to a manageable portion or publish it in several volumes. Readers may be advised to read part rather than all of this text, if they read it at all.

Ron Price
November 12th 2003


PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

Forty years ago this week the Baha'i community elected its first international body, the Universal House of Justice. The timing for the completion of this third edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs has been fortuitous since I have dedicated this book to these Men of Baha, as the Baha'is sometimes call this body at the apex of their administrative Order. The completion of the third edition of this work, this autobiography, in the last few days, coinciding as this completion does with the election of that international governing body for the ninth time, has been encouraging. Over these last two decades I have often been inclined to discontinue this whole exercise. With the writing of this third edition a renewed hope has entered the picture.

After nearly twenty years of working on this autobiography, or narrative non-fiction, as it might be called, I feel, at last, that it has a form worthy of publication and so I have entered it on my website at http://www.bahaipioneering.bahaisite.com/ Since the 1980s there has been a great interest in autobiography among the many minoritarian constituencies, as they are often called. The Baha'i community is but one of these many constituencies. My work it seems is part of this new wave of personalized, embodied narrative that foregrounds the particularity, as Anne Brewster puts it, of the everyday. Readers will also find elements of a grandnarrative here. For I link the epic and monumentalising narratives of history and science to the quotidian. There is no hierarchical opposition between the everyday and the official discourses of public life. I try, as far as I am able, to integrate the micro and the macro into one whole.

But readers who enjoy human interest stories and history and theoretically seek to learn about distant and unknown regions in a non-fictional account of an important period in history with geographical and historical highlights--when they pick up this narrative what they will get is not history, but myself telling my story. The everyday, it seems to me, is not reducible to simply pure or raw data from which the larger discourses of life are produced.