Post by ronprice on Dec 30, 2009 6:43:49 GMT -5
The art of autobiography has many facets. One of the critical facets is omission. One's own forgetfulness is very important. Most of my life is simply not here in my autobiography. It has been omitted in the interest of interest. As in the daily round one can only bring to memory a certain portion of one’s experience, otherwise one would literally drown in data, in memories, in a chaos of facticity. As the world passed through the golden age of astronomy during the last half century, as it advanced through a range of new technologies from the computer to satellite, from radio to TV, video to DVD, inter alia, as it doubled its population from 2.5 to 6.5 billion in my lifetime(1944-2010), so much was invented and developed, so much impacted on man and society-but I have omitted the discussion of these and so many other facets of the industrial and commercial developments of our time.
I belonged to the first generation born into a world in which television had been invented, but not yet popularized, in which the universe was mapped but not understood by the masses in even the slightest degree. Claude Simon, in the lecture he gave when given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, said, “I find that what one writes or describes is never something which has happened prior to the work of writing. On the contrary the writing produces something in every sense of the term in the course of working.” The writing, Simon argues, produces something within its own present. I find this to be my own experience as well. This work has returned unremittingly to decisive and not so decisive events in my life. I have created a seam of light, of gold, of joy, that has had its source, its origins in the field of science and especially astronomy. -Ron in Tasmania
I belonged to the first generation born into a world in which television had been invented, but not yet popularized, in which the universe was mapped but not understood by the masses in even the slightest degree. Claude Simon, in the lecture he gave when given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, said, “I find that what one writes or describes is never something which has happened prior to the work of writing. On the contrary the writing produces something in every sense of the term in the course of working.” The writing, Simon argues, produces something within its own present. I find this to be my own experience as well. This work has returned unremittingly to decisive and not so decisive events in my life. I have created a seam of light, of gold, of joy, that has had its source, its origins in the field of science and especially astronomy. -Ron in Tasmania