I was just reminded, at the Touchstone blog, that this is so-called “Banned Books Week.” Most of the incidents deplored in this posturing are simply disagreements about what books belong in a public or school library, or in a classroom, and it’s always irritated me (to an unreasonable degree, really, and I’m not sure why) that no distinction is made between that sort of thing and real repression. No doubt it has something to do with the fact that real repression is pretty hard to come by in the U.S.A. Here is S.M. Hutchens’s succinct demolition of the pretension. Hutchens is himself a librarian.

From The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes:

It is alleged by a friend of my family that I used to suffer from insomnia at the age of four; and that when she asked me how I managed to occupy my time at night I answered, “I lie awake and think about the past.”

—Fr. Ronald Knox