I feel an immense kinship with that American philosopher and
naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, in so many respects. His hunger,
as John Burroughs points out, was for health and the wild,
wilderness, wild men, Indians. He felt close to "the subtle
spirits" in this wilderness. He lived life delicately, daintily,
tenderly. Burroughs said he was unkind. By contrast, I see myself
as kind, one of the kind Canadians 'Abdu'l-Baha refers to in His
immortal Tablets, although my affinity for the wild and the
wilderness is clearly not as strong as Thoreau's. But I have his
hunger, although it expresses itself differently to Thoreau's. It
is an isolating hunger, as Thoreau's hunger isolated him. My hunger
is not for health or the wild but, rather, for knowledge and
civility.
When younger, until the age of about forty, I hungered for health.
By my mid-fifties I hungered for solitude. In my late teens and
twenties I hungered for sex. After working in the garden, I hunger
for water. Since I eat a very light breakfast, by two in the
afternoon I hunger for lunch. Our hungers change with the time of
day and the season, with the stage of our life and our
psychological needs. When I look back at more than sixty years of
living there seems to be an element of wildness which I trust I
have tamed significantly.
By my years of middle adulthood, forty to sixty, knowledge became,
increasingly, my great desire, although I saw significant
manifestations of this desire as early as the age of 30 when I
worked as a teachers' college lecturer. By sixty the symptoms of my
bi-polar disorder were, for the most part, treated. I yearned, too,
for that quiet civility with which genuine engagement with my
fellow men could be enjoyed when that engagement was either
necessary or desired. Perhaps this was due to a fatigue with much
conversation, my sense of an immense ignorance and my awareness of
a strong strain of grossness and the many traces of moral laxity
that not only stained my life but the name of the Faith I regarded
as holy and precious.
As Shoghi Effendi stated so boldly at the start of the first Plan
in 1937, "the controlling principle in the behaviour and conduct of
all Baha'is" has implications for "modesty,
purity....cleanmindedness ...moderation...and the daily vigilance
in the control of one's carnal desires." Any thorough examination
of the last fifty years of my life, 1953 to 2003, would reveal that
I am far from casting that "sleeve of holiness over all that hath
been created from water and clay." I see myself as modest but not
prudish but, sometimes, modesty and moderation gave way to an
excessiveness and a lack of control of sexual thoughts, feelings
and associations. This is a separate subject I cover in more detail
in my journal, my diary. But let me make a few general comments on
the subject of sex here.
On the subject of my sex life I think I could put the matter in the
same general context as Pepys and Boswell did in their now famous
autobiographies. For these two giants of the autobiographical
world, Pepys and Boswell, no seduction, no sexual experience, was
complete until it had been recorded in detail in their diary. What
is a complete account for me, of course, is in a class of its own
and quite distinct from the accounts of either Pepys's or Boswell's
sexual proclivities. My sex life, quite apart from my writing and
the intellectual labor that has gone into it and however
stimulating it may be to the reader, can be found revealed in my
unexpurgated diaries published, if they ever are, long after my
death. Much of my behaviour in life I would define as cyclical and
repetitive. My dedicated toil in life, a toil that often led to
successes of various kinds, was often followed by an orgy. But it
was an orgy of exhaustion, depression, a deepening relationship
with Thanatos and, sometimes anger, frustration and disappointment.
This was not always the case, but to avoid these words would
present a picture of my life far less than honest.
The record of my sexual life, however appetizing readers may find
it, is remarkably thin on the ground. Readers should not get their
hopes up too high as they contemplate reading my post-humously
published diaries. To apply what I like to think are my customary
powers of literary application to more than half a century of
sexual activity with a thoroughness that leaves little to the
imagination would require more space here, inspite of what I often
felt to be an insufficiency of this erotic enthusiasm, than I
really want to devote to the subject. From the observation of my
earliest erotic desires in childhood, to the loss of my virginity
in the arms of my first wife on my wedding night at the age of
twenty-three, to my surprisingly late-discovered masterbatory
abilities in middle age, my sexual exploits are given the kind of
detail in my diary that would probably leave the most ardent voyeur
unsatisfied, well, at least some ardent voyeurs. I leave my
readers, the ones who acquire a taste for what I write here, with a
reward at the end of the tunnel of my life. Stay tuned, your
persistence may yield its just deserts. My sexual achievements or
lack thereof, my career in fornication, like many of my forays into
aspects of lifes burgeoning variety of pursuits and however
stimulating they may be when well-written-up, will, it seems to me,
in the end contribute little to nothing to my literary reputation
or an understanding of the pioneering life. In my letters there is
surprisingly little on the subject of sex, but the enthusiast who
would seek out every jot and tittle on the subjectthey will find
their own reward. In the midst of the Parthian war Aurelius found
time to keep a kind of private diary, his famous "Meditations", or
twelve short books of detached thoughts and sentences in which he
gave over to posterity the results of a rigorous self-examination.
Others, in the midst of other wars, have also kept diaries. My war,
of quite a different nature and occupying a period of some
twenty-three years, resembles more the meditations of this ancient
Roman emperor than the exploits of military people and their guns,
swords and uniforms. 
