I don’t give myself credit for reading a book unless I’ve read it from beginning to end. Of the four or five thousand books I’ve bought over the years I’ve only read a few hundred of them through. During my Red Plan fight such reading was almost completely set aside. Once again I’m plowing through some good book, almost always non fiction, and they are reawakening my sleepy intellect.
I’ve been reading aloud to Claudia a lot lately. I’ve read a couple Bill Byson books and am now about two thirds done with the revised Diary of Anne Frank. After an hour of reading Frank tonight Claudia headed for bed and I switched over to a marvelous book Lincoln, the biography of a Writer before heading up to dump on Sarah Palin again in the blog.
By coincidence passages of both books tonight’s reading contained reference to sex. Anne raised the subject and grouses that parents won’t explain it to their children. Her complaint shows up in the middle of a string of entries which are almost tiresome in their yearning for, Peter, the young man who was also in hiding in “the annex.” She makes the rather bold comment that she could understand a sexual union without marriage so long as a couple were soul mates. I suspect that was an entry edited out by her Father in the original edition.
In the Lincoln volume the author, Fred Kaplan, tells an anecdote I’d forgotten about. He explains how Lincoln’s best friend in Springfield, Joshua Speed, set him up with Speed’s own “pretty girl.” When Lincoln and the girl had undressed he asked what it would cost and was embarrased to learn her services would require two more dollars than he had. She offered to give him credit but he put on his clothes and offered her the $3 that he had brought which she declined telling him that he was one of the few gentlemen she had ever met.
I’m inclined to believe this story. It must have been told by Speed himself to one of the many biographers of Lincoln perhaps to stress Abe’s honesty and perhaps with no expectation it would ever be put into print. Lincoln himself was famous for telling bawdy stories and anecdotes, so much so, that one farmer asked him why he didn’t put all his funny stories in print. Lincoln straightened his back and replied as though speaking through the stench of a rotting carcass: “Such a book would Stink like a thousand privies.”
We live in a day and age where every ten-year-old with half an hour alone with a computer will discover the mechanics of sex, something that 14 year old Frank had mostly figured out but which she indicated still held a few mysteries for her. The chaste and naive controversies of the past over sex education should be shelved and we should deal with our children with candor for their own protection. For those parents who wish to keep their children in the kind of ignorant state that they themselves probably never experienced there’s always home school.
Bu tfor those considering this option its worth pointing out that the two folks I’ve been reading about managed to achieve considerable distinction despite their precocious interest in the forbidden fruit. And if Lincoln and Frank are too secular there’s always the Song of Solomon. That’s in the Old Testament.
