I’m reading Azar Nafisi’s book right now, and I’m having a hard time getting through it. If you haven’t read it, Nafisi was an English lit professor at University of Tehran in Iran, and once she could no longer teach under Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule, she held a small group class in her home with her brightest students from past classes. The memoir is broken into four sections, one of which is Lolita. The others are James, Gatsy and Austen. But the other sections aren’t necessarily about her female students. She recalls different classrooms, and the conversations and controversies that happened around the books she taught. My issue with the book is that she meanders off into lit lessons so frequently that I lose my connection to the people she is trying to invoke, although the Amazon review highlights this as part of the book’s charm.

There is one passage in the book that is lingering with me. She is writing about Henry James and how the war changed him from a recluse into a vocal humanitarian activist. He wrote to a newly widowed woman the following:

“I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel because I have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you are worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.” In letters to friends, again and again he urges them to feel. Feeling would stir up empathy and would remind them that life was worth living (p. 215)

Nafisi wanted to share that passage with a woman in her class who was in prison for a number of years, and only survived because her father was well-connected. She saw other women raped, beaten and killed.

I identify strongly with having the “imagination of all things” but I fear allowing those feelings free reign, as he seems to advise. I’m wondering if his ability to allow himself those feelings eventually fueled his creative process? He says that it is “to his cost” and I wonder what was his cost.