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Pratt: Traveling through circumstance and time is quite an experience

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

Saturday, February 23, 2008
Story last updated at 2/23/2008 - 1:59 am

In 2008, I have already traveled through time and circumstance to places near and far.

The only cost, a few hours of sleep when I stayed too long with new friends to laugh and to cry as they told their stories. Through the thoughts of a female professor of literature, I visited Iran during the turbulent times after the shah was deposed. But then I experienced religious tyranny take hold.

You wonder why we defend the free exchange of ideas even when it is abused by people who appeal to the lowest of the low via pornography? Experience the book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi. Periodically, Americans flirt with censorship.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel, "Lolita," had its problems with the book-banning crowd because of the subject matter, a middle-aged man who sexually abuses a 12-year-old girl while blaming the girl for seducing him. The portrait of the predator is brilliantly done.

Thus, Nafisi makes indirect reference to the Islamic regime's lowering of the marriage age for girls to age 9 even as she leads the discussion group on the book as well as other works of Western literature.

As you might guess, some critics predictably accuse her of being part of a plot to aid the enemy, the West, specifically, America.

Do you think the Civil War ended slavery? Read "Same Kind of Different as Me" by Ron Hall and Denver Moore, published in 2006 by Thomas Nelson. It is the story of an unlikely friendship forged between an international art dealer in the Metroplex and a homeless man who roamed the streets of Fort Worth.

A friend who celebrated her 81st birthday in February told me she also has been busy traveling. Yet, we paid no airline tickets. We didn't even buy a tank of gas or shop for a new wardrobe.

I'm not sure where her travels took her. We didn't exchange that much information because there were other people around, and we didn't want to be so rude as to discuss our itinerary when our friends and family hadn't had the pleasure we had experienced.

Nothing is more boring than to hear too many details of someone else's trip, unless, it is looking at slide after slide of poorly done photos of people you don't know. Take your own trip. Then you enjoy discussing the journey.

With today's technology, so much is possible when it comes to learning about the world and the people who inhabit it. The Internet has enabled us to reach out in ways we could not have imagined only yesterday when I was young.

But nothing can replace the value and pleasure of reading good books. Textbooks are not good books. So, be sure children also are exposed to good literature, which transcends generations, culture and ethnicity.

We make a mistake, I think, when we try to entice children into reading by emphasizing the process instead of reading great stories to them and with them.

Good readers quickly skip to the head of the class, but that's only a side benefit of reading.

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