The Necessity to Speak

The messages we can share through ink and paper are unnumbered. Lessons are taught, truces are made, memories are surfaced, hate manifested, wars begun and lives changed. Many write to remember while some write to forget. I want to write to heal. The freedom that comes with writing is empowering and necessary.
In Sam Hamill's "Necessity to Speak", Hamill refers many times to battered women and children as well as the actions of adult battered children. He asserts, as many others have, that battered chidren grow up to be batterers of others. They learn that they can manage stress with violence and that there is little consequence for it. Gratefully the opportunities for reformation are many and this is not a pattern that is always played out. Hamill's message, however, is clear. The warning against violence is paramount. And the brave who can write of it's evils may find peace.

A Good Reader

Nabokov believes that a good reader should "notice and fondle details". That before one gathers their opinions they must first take in the whole book. He also advises that one should approach a book as if it is a "new world... having no obvious connections to the worlds we already know" and study it with that in mind. He goes further to make a list of qualities a good reader would possess, such as, someone who has an imagination, memory, artistic sense and a dictionary. Furthermore, and maybe of greatest importance is that a good reader is one who rereads.

I agree with Nabokov on his ideas of what a good reader is. The ideas I have always had on the qualities of a good reader are a little different however. Previously I have thought that a good reader should be one who reads fast and can grasp the information and recall it. I do not consider myself a good reader by Nabokov's standards or my own. That being said, I do fall under one of Nabokov's ideas, I am a rereader. I reread like crazy because I will have read a whole page in a book and find that I have no idea what I just read, so I have to go back and read it again. I understand this is not exactly the kind of rereading Nabokov was talking about, but it is probably as close as I am going to get.