Madam, - "A little learning is a dangerous thing;/ Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;/ There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,/ And drinking largely sobers us again."
Pope's oft-quoted lines are from his brilliant satire on those who, being unable or unwilling to do, make it their career to judge and censure those who do. On September 23rd we had one such, Mary Raftery, asserting, in common with that agency for crisis pregnancies, that youth has sipped too shallowly at the Pierian spring of the Tenth Muse, sex education.
Now, in my youth our draughts were furtive and shallow indeed in comparison with today's open-throated guzzling from those flooding waters. Yet "crisis pregnancies" were almost unknown to us - partly, of course, because of the fixation with hiding the few that occurred, but mostly because they were, actually, very few.
Even those few would be misappropriated by Ms Raftery and her oh-so-conventional ilk, who would say that what kept us from the well was a bunch of censorious celibates, burning with "an eunuch's spite". That is a glib judgment stemming from both a very little learning and intoxicated brains.
Was it not rather that aeons of human experience had fortified society's innate recognition that it is only when our youth is behind us that we become capable of drinking largely enough to sober us?
When sex is the purpose of youth, it submerges a far deeper truth; the purpose of sex is youth. - Yours, etc.,
FRANK FARRELL,
Lakelands Close,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.