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Atwood Luther And Me
Margaret Atwood(1939- ) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She graduated from high school in Toronto the year I entered my last year of primary school in Burlington just 30 miles away: 1957. We are both war-babies or members of what some social scientists call the silent generation. Atwood was always about 5 years ahead of me since she was born at the start of the war, while I was born toward its end.
Considered by one generational descriptor as “cautious, unimaginative and withdrawn,” members of our generation, the war-babies, grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s at a time of social conformity and, “looking for a type of rebirth.”1 They needed a cause. Both Atwood and I only fit some aspects of this generation descriptor. We both needed a cause. For me it became the Baha’i Faith. Atwood is one of Canada’s most successful writers with more than a dozen volumes of poetry and 20 volumes of prose to her credit.
Atwood got her M.A. in 1962 in literature, the same year I finished my last year of hometown baseball, entered my last year of high school and began my travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community in the small town of Dundas Ontario.
As my teaching career developed from primary, to secondary, to post-secondary levels, and as I travelled and worked from town to town in both Canada and Australia, in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, Atwood published book after book. She was catapulted to celebrity status in 1972, the first year I left Canada and began living in Australia as an international pioneer from Canada, the year I helped establish the first elected Baha’i group in the steel-port city of Whyalla South Australia.
Her book: Survival provided for Canadians like myself a wonderful insight into Canadian literature and into our very sense of identity.2-Ron Price with thanks to 1M. Nowak and D.T. Miller, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday & Co. Inc., N.Y. 1977, p.18; and 2Joyce Carol Oates, “Margaret Atwood’s Tale,” The New York Review of Books, 2 November 2006.
Yes, Margaret Atwood, I liked
your characterization and your
leitmotifs of Canadians about a
sense of survival….not triumph
or victory, like the Americans, &
not about those who made it….
but those who made-it-back……
I made it back, Margaret, from a
Baffin Island crash: ‘here I stand’
as Martin Luther said about half a
millennium ago at the outset of a
Protestant-German Reformation.1
1 Luther is sometimes quoted as saying: "Here I stand. I can do no other". Recent scholars consider the evidence for these words to be unreliable, since they were inserted before "May God help me" only in later versions of the speech and not recorded in witness accounts of the proceedings.
I read this book while studying in an honours history and philosophy B.A. program at McMaster University in 1964/5.-Richard Marius, Luther, Quartet, London, 1975, p.155.
Ron Price
8 January 2012
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married for 48 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 16, and a Baha'i for 56(in 2015)
Last edited by RonPrice : 01-22-2012 at 05:31 AM.
Reason: to add some words
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