Monday morsels: "truth triumphs"

So far 2013 has been a great year for reading.  I've been enjoying two books lately.  One is Barbara Kingsolver's book of essays entitled High Tide in Tucson.  (We discussed two of her essays for our book study group, which is why I read the book in the first place.)  The other is Karen Swallow Prior's Booked:  Literature in the Soul of Me, which tells about her journey through books that shaped her life at different stages, from Charlotte's Web to Jane Eyre and more.  (I heard about this book through many of my blogger friends and knew it was a must-read; so far it's wonderful.)

Interestingly, almost on the same day, I read a passage in each book about the importance of letting children read widely and not censoring their reading.  (Swallow Prior uses John Milton's phrase "books should be promiscuously read" to characterize this type of free, indiscriminate reading.)  I appreciated these comments because I know my love of books was enhanced by the fact that I was allowed to read whatever I liked, from Archie comics and Tom Swift books to Lucy Maud Montgomery and S.E. Hinton and Judy Blume and .... the list goes on.  In fact, after reading these passages, I am now almost not embarrassed about how many Harlequin Romances I read while babysitting.  Almost.

*****

"Now that I am a parent myself, I'm sympathetic to the longing for some control over what children read, or watch, or do.  Our protectiveness is a deeply loving and deeply misguided effort to keep our kids inside the bounds of what we know is safe and right.  Sure, I want to train my child to goodness.  But unless I can invoke amnesia to blot out my own past, I have to see it's impossible to keep her inside the world I came up in.  That world rolls on, and you can't step in the same river twice.  The things that prepared me for life are not the same things that will move my own child into adulthood .... If there is a danger in ... the works of ... authors who've been banned at one time or another, the danger is generally that they will broaden our experience and blend us more deeply with our fellow humans.  Sometimes this makes waves."

- Barbara Kingsolver, "How Mr. Dewey Decimal Saved My Life"
High Tide in Tucson (pp. 50-51)

*****

"It seems to me to be an entirely negative, not to mention ineffective, strategy to shield children from reality rather than actively expose them to the sort of truth that emerges organically from the give-and-take of weighing and reckoning competing ideas against one another.  Discovering truth is a process that occurs over time, more fully with each idea or book that gets added to the equation.  Sure, many of the books I read in my youth filled my head with silly notions and downright lies that I mistook for truth, but only until I read something else that exposed the lie for what it was .... Milton argued passionately in his treatise [Areopagitica] that the best way to counteract falsehood is not by suppressing it, but by countering it with truth.  The essence of Milton's argument is that truth is stronger than falsehood; falsehood prevails through the suppression of countering ideas, but truth triumphs in a free and open exchange that allows truth to shine."

- Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (pp. 14, 19)