Rebecca Solnit - Men Explain Lolita to Me

While we honor Ovid's declaration that  "All things change, nothing is extinguished."  We must also honor Rebecca Solnit's latest mansplaination regarding the fact that some things (a.k.a., privileged white men) never seem to change as she discusses opinions about her interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel, Lolita.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn’t, but who doesn’t love riffing on Jane Austen?… 

...It isn’t a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God. This can happen if he’s been insufficiently exposed to the fact that there are also other people who have other experiences, and that they too were created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and that consciousness thing that is so interesting and troubling is also going on inside their heads. This is a problem straight white men suffer from especially, because the western world has held up a mirror to them for so long—and turns compliant women into mirrors reflecting them back twice life size, Virginia Woolf noted. 

Too many men are blinded by privelobliviousness, but Solnit believes in the power of art to transform one way or another...a good reminder for those who wish to change the world.

You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.