Do you like the way I have put this philosophical aspect of "Home?"
We have here a centre of gravity, some ideal of the rounded fullness of life in all its variety, a normality, a natural condition in which men can feel easy and at home. There is something trusted and familiar here, an inner battle but not a man divided against himself, or against others, or against nature. There is skepticism here, deep and pervasive, necessary, a collirium. There is a single doctrine, a coherent conceptual schema which explains life and offers solutions to the human condition in all its staggering complexity. We have here a high idealism. We have a new, richer, deeper form of collective self-knowledge of what men are and can be. It is a branching out in a new direction, tidy in some ways, messy in others, still hesitant. It is not random, haphazard or chaotic, but there is tragedy here and a solemnity beneath the joy. There are many burning issues, but within a framework of conception, of definition, of order, of choice. There is something complete and cogent, growing and illuminated by a half-light, formidable and massive, yet unobtrusive and a symptom of a basic sanity in our time. -Ron Price with apprecation to Roger Hausheer for his Introduction to Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas-Isaiah Berlin, Hogarth Press, London, 1979, pp.13-53.
Here is a vision so novel,
so complex; here am I
spellbound in its grip,
in its constellation of forces,
in its richly suggestive doors
of perception, engendering
a perspective for what is
distinctive here, re-examining
the bases of modernity and
an underlying philosophy.
How can one sharply, succinctly,
say what is distinctive here?
Reason and revelation in an embrace
the like of which the world has never seen.
A vision of the world, unique, sublime,
relative to our age, in the words of
an incomparable, brilliant writer
now witnessing the triumph of civility
and we watch good men being made,
albeit slowly, in institutions, at last,
blessed, in a modern oasis
amidst a sea of aridity, imprecision,
suspicion, technical virtuosity, conformity,
monotony, military-industrial complexes,
bureaucracy and a craving
for a new Gemeinschaft.
The crooked timber of humanity
is being made straight before our eyes
in an amazingly complex process
while the heavy weight of recent
centuries of nationalism at last
is loosened while we find a true
international friend in our home.
Ron Price
1 December 1995
