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Although I had broad intellectual interests as an adult, my pursuit of career, family commitments, simple lack of money and my involvement in the Baha’i Faith left little time for other activities: I did not play golf or follow sports after the age of 21; I did not take up painting or cooking or photography or anything one could call a hobby, although I did collect stamps in my; I watched little TV, had no TV from 1956 to 1976, although after I retired I watched over two hours a day; I rarely went to movies, to various forms of entertainment or ate out.
For 40 years I played the guitar and led sing-alongs. I joined the Baha’i Faith with its world of meetings and outings, lounge-rooms, conferences and clusters. I went for a daily walk of about half an hour among a host of other domestic, familial and social activities that are part of the lives of fathers and husbands in the west. I think it highly unlikely that aspects of my life will become legendary as did the lives of many a celebrity in my time. No series of iconographic images evoked from fact and fiction will ever produce a celluloid dream as has been produced for many a culture hero of these seven decades. There will be no fantastical caricature of my life with its inevitable exaggerations, bright colours and haunting themes and images created for the world of cinema and a mass audience. Mementos and mis-remembering, forms of pride and various prejudices, will never be mixed together and served up as legend to hungry fans in this or ensuing centuries. Every year hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors will never flock to some of the locales where I have lived. No one will ever have to locate or re-locate my legend in some tangled interweaving of history, myth and memories. The millions and billions of people in this and future centuries whose names, whose lives and memories are and will be excluded from history, will not be pulled into some vortex, some timeless world of myth and dream, legend and narrative associated with the places I have lived, my places of memory and my life’s experiences.
“Cinema is most akin to music, writes R.D. Crano, “insofar as it utilizes time as an elemental raw material in its sculpting of space.” I could say the same about autobiography--my autobiography--but the comparison and contrast is too complex to pursue here. Crano also makes another interesting observation about music and cinema which I will quote here for its implications for this my autobiography: “they have the potential to operate in a purely anarchic mode, as a temporal phenomena comprised of heterogeneous movements and recurring motifs.”
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