Where we live

I've been completely overwhelmed by Reading Lolita in Tehran. It's the kind of book that makes me have to get up and pace around every fifteen minutes or so while I'm reading. I keep thinking of my students in Beijing, which by 1994 certainly was nowhere near as difficult as her experience, but so much is similar--the idea that these old boys (Fitzgerald, etc.) could really be subversive, the semi-clandestine meetings in someone's home, the joy of meeting minds. But above all, the seriousness of the class. I saw this also in Africa. We don't realize here how every flip comment betrays our privileged status.

That ideas can have meaning, that a book is worth a life.