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I would argue that this here and now world and all its mundanities, underlines, shapes and informs the modes of rationality, the philosophies and ideologies, which are said to transcend it. Formal and official discourses and institutions, in turn, inform and shape this everyday life. My work seeks to deconstruct and integrate the conventional playing out of the relationship between these two domains which, historically, have been hierarchised, gendered and always in conflict, always contestatory. Rather than being mutually exclusive, these heterogeneous zones inform each other. Rather than being seen as redundant, trivial and empty, everyday life is thought of here as a field in which 'macrostructural categories', such as those of official and pedagogic discourses, 'are ongoingly translated into manageable structures of sense at human scale.'

I first read my grandfather's autobiography in 1983. It is a book written in the first two years of the Formative Age, 1921-1923, by a man who had just turned fifty years of age. The book was the account of the first twenty-nine years of his life. This work of more than 100,000 words, by a formally uneducated man, was an inspiration to me and my writing. And so I have also dedicated this book to my grandfather, Alfred J. Cornfield.

I have now written perhaps more than 200,000 words about the first fifty-eight years of my life, twice as many years as those in my grandfather's autobiography. I see this edition as a working base, a mental precinct, for an ongoing exercise in autobiography and autobiographical analysis and an exercise, too, in integrating the multitude of insights from a lifetime of experience of which reading in the social sciences and humanities has been an important part. When enough changes to this third edition have been made, a fourth edition will take its place some time in the years, or perhaps just months, ahead. Perhaps, too, like Edward Gibbon I'll complete six editions before this earthly life is out. Gibbon's autobiography, of course, became significant because of its association with his famous work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The significance of this work, if indeed it comes to possess any significance at all, will be due to my association with a Movement that claims to be the emerging world religion on this planet. The world-wide development of the Baha'i Order and the first stirrings of the coming World Order have seen and will see a tremendous development in my lifetime. Although I see my life in the context of these wider themes, I do not focus on these themes which are dealt with in other places, other books, in much more detail. Another central context for my life has been as a prelude to a prelude, to an eventual mass-conversion of the peoples of the world to the Baha'i Faith. The process of entry-by-troops is the prelude to that mass conversion and thus far, in most of the places I have lived, entry-by-troops has been more like, as one clever-editor once put it, entry-by-roos.