Paul Goodman(1911-1972): Some Thoughts

Paul Goodman published Growing Up Absurd in 1960 and Compulsory Mis-Education and Community of Scholars as a single volume in 1962. These were my first years as a Bahá'í and the beginning of my pioneer-travel-teaching life, little did I know it at the time as I struggled through my last years of high school and enjoyed the pleasures of success in sport. While at university in the years 1963 to 1966 I may have come across these books of Paul Goodman, although I can not recall now exactly when I read them. Perhaps I did not read them until I was a teacher-teacher in the early 1970s in Tasmania or a lecturer in the social-sciences in those same years. These books are part of a literary and intellectual miasma, a complex, fascinating but partly poisonous brew from which, within which, I slowly sought to distill a cup of pure and limpid water. Now, as I look back after thirty years(1979-2009) at those first two decades of serious reading, 1959 to 1979, I can see the first traces of my efforts to acquire that first attribute of perfection: “learning and the cultural attainments of the mind.”1 –Ron Price with apprecation to 1’‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970(1927), p.35.

You certainly churned-out a prolix
quantity of stuff, Paul. I remember
your work on the periphery of my
brain somewhere in my amygdala
and my hippocampi where all my
memories are recorded, fear and
conscious thought, emotions are
controlled, emotionally charged
events are set for life and I can
bring them back to life as if they
were yesterday. I’ve lived longer
than you, Paul.1 You did so much
in your short sixty years—giving
Gestalt therapy a kick-start back
then when I was a child/adolescent.2

Yes, losing ourselves in learning,
creation and our craft is the way
to become something, contribute
to civilization with gifts of spirit.

1 Goodman lived to the age of 61(1911-1972); I have already outlived him by four years.
2 Goodman is remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt therapy in the 1940s and 1950s.

Ron Price
22 March 2009

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