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# 2019-12-17 - A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle
I picked up this book at a whim in the biography section of the local
library. I felt pleasantly surprised to read language that is almost
identical to that of The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, only
Madeleine L'Engle's book was published in 1972 and it used a more
down-to-earth vocabulary. In her writing i sensed a kindred spirit,
both when i was a child, and now as an adult. She comes across as
very real, that quality i most admire and seek in other people.
All that follows below are excerpts that stood out to me, with any of
my comments enclosed in square brackets.
Every so often I need OUT; something will throw me into total
disproportion, and I have to get away from everybody--away from all
these people I love the most in the world--in order to regain a sense
of proportion. ... often I need to get away completely, if only for
a few minutes. My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a
circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings.
There's a natural stone bridge over the brook, and I set there,
dangling my legs and looking through the foliage at the sky reflected
in the water, and things slowly come back into perspective. ... I
move slowly into a kind of peace that is marvelous, "annihilating all
that's made to a green thought in a green shade." If I sit for a
while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed
annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.
The burning bush: somehow I visualize it as much like one of these
blueberry bushes. The bush burned, was alive with flame and was not
consumed. Why? Isn't it because, as a bush, it was perfect? It was
exactly as a bush is meant to be. It IS. I go to the brook because
I get out of being, out of the essential. So I'm not like the bush,
then. I put all my prickliness, selfishness, in-turnedness, onto my
ISness; we all tend to, and when we burn, this part of us is
consumed. I think that part of us that has to be burned away is
something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned
in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but our
ontological selves; what we are meant to be.
... not because we are sufficient unto ourselves--I am not: my
husband, my family, my friends give me my meaning and, in a sense, my
being, so that I know that I am ontological: essential: real.
For the last two weeks of July this summer I abandoned the family,
the kitchen stove, the brook, and flew out to Ohio State University
to be a Writer in Residence for a special program of Reading Fellows.
... I had expected, during the question periods after both morning
and afternoon sessions, that I would get questions about writing, and
teaching children something about the arts. Mostly I got questions
about the nature of the universe. Perhaps the questions weren't as
direct as those I get from high-school or grade-school students,
because these men and women were experienced and sophisticated; but
their queries were aimed in the same direction.
[They were from diverse backgrounds.] I wanted to be very careful
that when we used a word everybody would understand it in the same
way, and this meant that we did a lot of stopping to define. Often I
would use a word which I hoped did not already have a preconditioned
meaning for them.
In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only
outside of time, he is outside HIMSELF. He has thrown himself
completely into whatever he is doing. A child playing a game,
building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely IN what he
is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is
wholly focused outside himself.
When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw
ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of
creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or
an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only
escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.
The Greeks had a word for ultimate self-consciousness which I find
illuminating: hubris: pride: pride in the sense of putting oneself in
the center of the universe. The strange and terrible thing is that
this kind of total self-consciousness invariably ends in
self-annihilation.
I was timid about putting forward most of these thoughts, but this
kind of timidity is itself a form of pride. The moment that humility
becomes self-conscious, it becomes hubris. Humility is throwing
oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.
Creativity is an act of discovery. The very small child, the baby,
is still unself-conscious enough to take joy in discovering himself:
he discovers his fingers; he gives them his complete unself-conscious
concentration.
When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child,
this is: art: prayer: love.
One summer ago, I paid our grocery bill for the month. Our new
checkbook was with my husband in the city, but I had a rather elderly
checkbook which did not have the mandatory cybernetic salad in the
bottom left-hand corner. However, I had the money in the bank, and I
had my right and proper signature on the check. I was brought up to
believe that, if I need to, I can use a piece of birch bark, write
the name of the bank, the person to whom the money is to go, the sum,
the signature, and this constitutes a valid check.
But my check was bounced. When it was explained to me that it was
because it was missing some magnetic gibberish, I was furious. I saw
no reason why my old checks weren't still valid... My friend said,
"Oh, come off it, Madeleine, you know that check won't go through."
His job is to handle vast sums of money daily; he knows what he's
talking about.
I asked "Do you really and truly mean that my signature, my NAME,
means nothing, absolutely nothing at all?"
"That's what I mean."
It was a wet and windy day. I looked at the rain slashing against
the windows, pulled out a check with cybernetic salad in the bottom
left-hand corner, said, "All right, then, I feel like Emily Brontë
today," and signed it Emile Brontë.
My friend was not amused. "Madeleine, what are you doing?"
"You just told me that my name means nothing, absolutely nothing at
all. Okay, so I feel like Emily Brontë and I don't see why I
shouldn't sign it Emily Brontë Take it--just for fun--and let's see
what happens."
"I know perfectly well what's going to happen. I won't get my money."
But after lunch he came in, looking rather sheepish. He had his ten
dollars and fifty cents, and no questions asked at the bank about the
signature. "But it won't go through with your monthly statement.
It'll bounce."
"All right. If it bounces I'll write you another check."
It did not bounce. I now have canceled checks signed Emily Brontë,
Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
In the battle between Madeleine and the machine, at this point the
machine is winning.
A signature; a name; the very being of the person you talk to, the
child you teach, is at stake. What is a self-image? Who started
talking about one? I rather fancy it was Madison Avenue. Picture
Satan in a business suit, with well-groomed horns and a superbly
switching tail, sitting at his huge executive's desk, thinking, "Aha!
If I can substitute images for reality I can get a lot more people
under my dominion."
In the moment of failure I knew that the idea of Madeleine, who had
to write in order to be, was not an image.
The better word [better than happy] is joy, because it doesn't have
anything to do with pain, physical or spiritual. I have been wholly
in joy when I have been in pain--childbirth is the obvious example.
Joy is what has made the pain bearable and, in the end, creative
rather than destructive.
Half of the problem is that identity is something which must be
understood intuitively, rather than in terms of provable fact. An
infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define
everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy. The
most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves,
who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals.
But that [distinctiveness] comes second. Personhood comes first...
The people I know who are most concerned about their individuality,
who probe constantly into motives, who are always turned inwards
towards their own reactions, usually become less and less individual,
less and less spontaneous, more and more afraid of the consequences
of giving themselves away. They are perhaps more consistent than the
rest of us, but also less real.
The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of
paradox and contradiction.
An acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We
do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet
acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
To settle for [giving a child a self-image] because we can't give a
child a self is manipulation, coercion, and ultimately the coward's
way out.
I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. A self is not something
static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished
and complete. A self is always becoming. BEING does mean becoming,
but we run so fast it is only when we seem to stop--as sitting on a
rock at the brook--that we are aware of our own ISness of being. But
certainly this is not static, for this awareness of being is always a
way of moving from the selfish self--the self-image--and towards the
real.
I was in that area of despair where one is incapable of being
ontological [real]. In my definition of the word, this is sin.
But there's still pride to fall over, not pride in the sense of
self-respect, but in that Greek sense of hubris: pride against the
gods; do-it-yourselfism, which the Greeks understood to mean "I can
do it myself just as well as, if not better than, the gods." When my
hubris gets pricked, I bleed; or at any rate my hubris bleeds.
We probably have more scientific knowledge at our fingertips today
than ever before, and yet we are incapable of handling this knowledge
creatively... More personally, my intellect is a stumbling block to
much that makes life worth living: laughter; love; a willing
acceptance of being created. The rational intellect doesn't have a
great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do
with art.
I must be willing to accept the explosions that take place deep down
in the heart of the volcano, sending up an occasional burst of flame
into the daylight of consciousness.
It's a strange thing that despite the anti-intellectualism in our
country, we also set so much store by IQ's and objective testing in
our schools and colleges and businesses.
How do we teach a child--our own, or those in a classroom--to have
compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like
is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact
that the most important questions a human being can ask do not
have--or need--answers.
> Love is not an emotion. It is a policy. --Hugh Bishop.
Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be
proved, and more than anything else important in life can be proved.
Love is a person. Love has a lot to do with compassion, and with
creation.
I'm quite willing to admit that all images in all forms of art have
multiple meanings, and one of the meanings is usually a sex meaning.
Let's just think about the mountains: one of the most beautiful
mountain ranges in our country is the Grand Tetons, which means the
Great Breasts. Why not? The idea of nature as mother is hardly new,
and I think I've made it clear that I'm all for the pleasures of the
body. When, as a very young girl, I read that Freud said that the
baby at its mother's breast experienced sexual pleasure, and so does
the mother, I was naïvely shocked. When I nursed my own babies I
knew what he meant; it was pure sensual delight. It was also an
unmitigated act of love, an affirmation of creation.
[By the way, etymology of the word "beauty" comes from the name of a
French shirt that revealed a woman's breasts. The Grand Tetons also
comes from the French language. Fitting to describe them as one of
the most beautiful mountain ranges in our country.]
Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn't mean to get lost in
the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one's own. It is not
that in compassion one cuts oneself off from feeling, only from one's
own selfishness, self-centeredness.
I've known for a long time that we know nothing about love, that we
do not have love, until we give it away.
When I was an extremely naughty child in an English boarding school,
the worst thing that we could call anybody was "pi." [Short for
pious.]
Dante says: "You cannot understand what I write unless you understand
it in a four-fold way: on the literal level, the moral level, the
allegorical level, and the anagogical level. [The anagogical level]
is that level of a book which breaks the bounds of time and space and
gives us a glimpse of the truth, that truth which casts the shadows
into Plato's cave, the shadows which are all we mortals are able to
see.
# Chapter 2
I do mind, desperately, that the word "Christian" means for so many
people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thouness. Who, today,
can recognize a Christian because of "how those Christians love one
another"?
To be responsible means precisely what the word implies: to be
capable of giving a response. It isn't only the Flower Children or
Hell's Angels who are opting out of society. A writer who writes a
story which has no response to what is going on in the world is not
only copping out himself but helping others to be irresponsible, too.
To refuse to respond is itself a response. Those of us who write are
responsible for the effect of our books. Those who teach, who
suggest books to either children or adults, are responsible for their
choices. Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of
indifference and out-and-out evil which surround us or we light a
candle to see by.
We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into
a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to a point where
it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world
they will have to live in when they grow up. ... Our responsibility
to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away,
but to give them weapons against it.
One of the greatest weapons of all is laughter, a gift for fun, a
sense of play which is sadly missing from the grownup world.
Paradox again: to take ourselves seriously enough to take ourselves
lightly. If every hair of my head is counted, then in the very
scheme of the cosmos I matter... When I remember this it is as though
pounds were lifted from me. I can take myself lightly, and share in
the laughter...
So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood.
We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of
childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an
affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our
essential selves. [Pretty challenging.]
Then there's a need for adventure; we're not providing legitimate
adventure for many of them: how many ghetto high school kids can
qualify for the Peace Corps or Vista? So they seek adventure
illegitimately.
They really don't want me to answer their questions, nor should I.
If I have not already answered them ontologically, nothing I say is
going to make any sense. Where I can be of use is being willing to
listen while they spread their problem out between us; they can then
see it themselves in better perspective.
But over the years two questions of mine have evolved which make
sense to me. [These regard the viability of romantic relationships.]
* How is work going? Are you functioning at a better level than
usual? Do you find that you are getting more work done in less
time? If you are, then I think that you can trust this love. If
you find that you can't work well, that you're functioning under
par, then I think something may be wrong.
* What about your relations with the rest of the world? It's
alright in the beginning for you to be the only two people in the
world, but after that your ability to love should become greater
and greater. If you find that you love lots more people than you
ever did before, then I think that you can trust this love. IF you
find that you need to be exclusive, that you don't like being
around other people, then I think that something may be wrong.
Suddenly I said, "Hey, I think I know why astrology has such
tremendous appeal. The year and month and day you are born matters.
The very moment you are born matters. This gives people a sense of
their own value as persons that the church hasn't been giving them."
To matter in the scheme of the cosmos: this is better theology than
all our sociology. It is, in fact, all that God has promised us:
that we matter. That he cares. If God cares about us, we have to
care about each other.
Something very wrong that our generation, as a whole, has done is to
set one example for our children that may be even more telling than
we realize: we respect old age even less than they do. Our parents,
as they grow old, are frequently shuffled off into homes or
institutions [AKA bedlam]. We persuade ourselves that they'll be
happier there, they'll be better off with their "own kind"
(chronological segregation seems to me one of the worst sins of all),
but actually the real problem is that we have neither the time nor
the space for them in this urban, technological world. ... I know of
no easy solution.
I heard a doctor say that the living tend to withdraw emotionally
from the dying, thereby driving them deeper into isolation. Not to
withdraw takes tremendous strength. To pull back is a temptation; it
doesn't hurt nearly as much as remaining open.
It takes tremendous maturity, a maturity I don't possess, to strike
the balance of involvement/detachment which makes us creatively
useful, able to be compassionate, to be involved in the other
person's suffering rather than in our own response to it.
As modern medicine keeps people alive far beyond the old threescore
years and ten, the problem increases. Evading a realistic acceptance
of death and old age hurts not only our parents but our children, and
even when it is accepted responsibly, it is criticized. Friends of
our in New York are being censured because the wife's father is dying
in their apartment: he should be put in a hospital, they are told;
how can you let your children see death?
But this old man does not require specialized nursing; he does
require love and acceptance, and he can have this in his own family
in a way in which it can never be given even in the best of
hospitals. Which children are being shown the true example of mature
love? Those who are asked to share life and death? Or those who are
"spared" of all unpleasantness? Which children are being helped to
become redeemed adults?
# Chapter 3
One day this past spring a young man who works part-time for the
Cathedral came into the library to let off steam. He is not a
Christian, and he hates the church in any structured form--what is
sometimes called the Establishment. He began judgmentally denouncing
all the clergy for being hypocrites.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Just what do you mean by hypocrite?"
They did not, it seemed, live up to his standard for clergymen. I
was willing to concede that not only was this undoubtedly true but
they probably didn't live up to their own standards for clergymen,
either. I said, "You talk a lot about your integrity, but you go on
working here, taking every advantage the Cathedral gives you, and
disapproving vocally of everything it stands for. How do you manage
that? How close is the 'you' of your ideals to the 'you' of reality?
When I react the way you've just been doing about someone else's
behavior, it usually stops me short if I remember how far my actual
self is from the self I would like to be."
One of the reasons this young man and I are friends ... is that he
understands what I'm getting at. "You mean," he said slowly, "that
what I'm really doing, underneath, is talking about myself?"
"Yes, but not only you. All of us. We all do it."
The most "whole" people I know are those in whom the gap between the
"ontological" self and the daily self is the smallest. The Latin
integer means untouched; intact. In mathematics, an integer is a
whole number. The people I know who are intact don't have to worry
about their integrity; they are incapable of doing anything which
would break it.
Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we
are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.
The gap between our "real" and "actual" selves is, to some degree, in
all of us; no one is completely whole. It's part of what makes us
human beings instead of gods. When we refuse to face this gap in
ourselves, we widen it.
It is only a sacramental view of life which helps me to understand
and bear this gap; it is only my "icons," which, lovingly and
laughingly, point it out to me: throughout the years others have come
to help me.
People like Una can be icons for me. Una feels, with justification,
that she has been betrayed by the Establishment. One of these
betrayals came when she went to church and was made to feel unwelcome
because she was black. Una is for revolution. And so, I discover,
am I.
Because we are human, these communities tend to become rigid. They
stop evolving, revolving, which is essential to their life, as is the
revolution of the earth about the sun is essential to the life of our
planet, our full family and basic establishment. Hence, we must
constantly be in a state of revolution, or we die.
My own forgetfulness, the gap between the real, revolutionary me and
the less alive creature who pulls me back, is usually only too
apparent. [My learning] is a humbling process, but also a joyful one.
So my hope, each day as I grow older, is that ... I will also grow
into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only
through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid
to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without
feeling threatened, to understand that I cannot take myself seriously
until I stop taking myself seriously--to be, in fact, a true adult.
To be.
With the people I love most I can sit in silence indefinitely. We
need both for our full development; the joy of the sense of sound;
and equally great joy of its absence.
After the unexpected success of A Wrinkle in Time I was invited to
quite a lot of literary bashes, and frequently was approached by
publishers who had rejected Wrinkle. "I wish you had sent the book
to us." I could usually respond, "But I did."
When Hal Vursell was asked why they had accepted it when other
publishers were afraid of it, he replied, both privately and publicly
in a published article from which I quote briefly: "We have all, from
time to time, chosen and published obviously superior books, a book
not written to prescription or formula, one which we passionately
believed to be far better than nine-tenths of what was currently
being offered, only to have that very book still-born. Now editors
have emotions, too, and when this happens, believe it or not, they
bleed. All of us have a longer or shorter list of such books we
still mourn. But if this happens to an editor too often, he loses
his ability to judge and dare creatively; he has a strong urge to
retreat permanently to the sluggish waters of 'safe' publishing. So
to have refused A Wrinkle in Time carries no stigma of editorial
cowardice; the bravest of us pause from time to time to bind up our
wounds. It was our own good fortune that the manuscript reached us
at a moment when we were ready to do battle again."
W. Somerset Maugham said, "The common idea that success spoils people
by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on
the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and
kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel."
Adults can, and do [lie], and perhaps the earlier we discover it, the
better for us. I was about eight, certainly old enough to have
forgotten what it is like to wet one's pants. One day in French
class I asked to be excused. The French teacher must have been
having problems with children wanting to leave the room for other
reasons, and using the bathroom as an excuse, because she forbade me
to go. I asked her three times, and three times was told, No. When
the bell for the end of class rang I bolted from my desk and ran, but
I couldn't quite make it, and spent the rest of the afternoon sodden
and shamed.
When my mother heard what happened, she demanded to see the
principal. I remember with awful clarity the scene in the
principal's office, after the French teacher had been summoned. She
said, "But Madeleine never asked to go to the bathroom. If she had
only raised her hand, of course I would have excused her."
She was believed. I suppose the principal had to believe the
teacher, rather than the child with wet clothes. I was reprimanded
gently, told to ask next time, and not to lie about it afterwards, it
really wasn't anything dreadful to make that kind of mistake.
To have an adult lie, and to have another adult not know that it was
a lie; to tell the truth myself and not be believed: the earth shook
on its foundations.
A poetry contest was announced for the entire lower school; the judge
was to be the head of the upper-school English Department. The
entries weren't screened by the home-room teachers, otherwise I
wouldn't have had a chance of getting anything in.
When I won, there was a great sound and fury. My teacher said that
Madeleine must have copied the poem; she couldn't possibly have
written it; she isn't very bright, you know.
It was an issue big enough for my parents to hear about it. My
mother produced the poems and stories I had been writing while I
should have been doing homework, and it was finally conceded that
Madeleine could have written that poem after all.
At O.S.U. this July we asked each other: how much pain and rejection
and failure and humiliation can a child take? Pain can be a creative
teacher, but there is a point where it is totally destructive. The
span of endurance varies from child to child; it is never infinite.
What would have happened if my parents had not been able to remove me
from that particular school where teacher and student alike had me
pegged as different and therefore a failure?
I remember quite clearly coming home in the afternoon, putting my
school bag down, and thinking, calmly and bitterly, "I am the
cripple, the unpopular girl," leaving my book bag where it lay, and
writing a story for myself where the heroine was the kind of girl I
would have liked to be.
Warning, parents, teachers, friends: once a child starts to think of
himself this way, it's almost impossible for the "image"--I think
that's the right word here--to be changed.
A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but
enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to
the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity
has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent. [Beauty
cries out for more beauty. Oh when we come into our calling, we ring
like bells, calling to everyone else, oh come, come into your
calling, oh come, come into your calling.]
The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more
limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited
their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create.
The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to
think for ourselves.
Alas. What have we done to our good, bawdy, Anglo-Saxon four-letter
words? We have not done violence to them; we have done the opposite.
We have blunted them so with overuse that they no longer have any
real meaning for us.
When will we be able to redeem our shock words? They have been
turned to marshmallows. They need violence done to them again; they
need to be wrested from banality; saved for the crucial moment. We
no longer have anything to cry in time of crisis.
"Help!" we bleat. And no one hears us. "Help" is another of those
four-letter words that don't [sic] mean anything anymore.
Perhaps the fact that I do not remember the teacher who accused me of
copying that poem tells something about her: I do not remember her
name; I do not remember what she looked like, the color of her hair
or eyes, her age, or the kind of clothes she wore. I remember
exactly what Miss Clapp looked like, her hair style, makeup, little
idiosyncrasies of dress and manner which were wonderfully dear to me.
But that other teacher: nothing. When she decided that I was
neither bright nor attractive nor worth her attention, she excluded
me, and this is the most terrible thing one human being can do to
another. She ended up annihilating herself.
To annihilate. That is murder.
We kill each other in small ways all the time.
The Greeks, as usual, had a word for the forgiving kind of love which
never excludes. They called it agapé. There are many definitions
of agapé, but the best I know is in one of Edward Nason West's
books: agapé means "a profound concern for the welfare of another
without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that
other, or to enjoy the process."
The mistresses [at the English boarding school] assumed that all
Americans chew gum. "All Americans"--absurd generality: I was ME.
And one of my particular oddities is that I was one of the one in ten
who is born without the tooth on either side of the two front teeth.
Usually when this happens the second teeth are simply allowed to grow
together. If the dentist had let this happen with me, it would have
given my face a narrow look, so he made a gold upper plate on which
were fastened two small teeth; while the mouth is growing, a
permanent bridge cannot be used. It was easy for me to take my
tongue and loosen the gold bridge, which covered the entire roof of
my mouth, and I often did so. One morning at assembly, when the roll
was being taken, I was happily sucking my gold bridge, and the
mistress taking the roll call saw me, assumed that I was chewing gum,
and snapped at me, "Come here." Obediently I walked up in front of
the entire expectant school. She held out her hand. "Spit." I
spat. She looked with horror at the gold bridge with two small teeth.
We have forgotten how to touch each other, and we try desperately to
do it in wrong, impossible ways which push us further and further
apart.
There is a group of young ex-drug addicts in California called the
Jesus Freaks. They have turned against drugs, and the transitory
values of the world around them. I have met a group of Jesus Freaks
in New York. They are, in an ancient, Pentecostal sense, trying to
find truth, and what love really means. I'm not sure that they're
looking in the right direction--though they may be. The important
thing is that groups of Jesus Freaks should exist in the
nineteen-seventies at all. There weren't any around in the sixties.
Something extraordinary and new is emerging, and it gives me hope.
Small children do not yet have a sense of chronology and therefore
live in eternity; they are far more willing to accept death than we
are.
The myths of man have always made it clear that it is impossible for
us to look at the flame of reality directly and survive. Semele
insisted on seeing her lover in his own form, as god, and was struck
dead. In the Old Testament it is explicitly stated, many times, that
man cannot look on the living God and live.
If we are not going to deny our children the darker side of life, we
owe it to them to show them that there is also this wild brilliance,
this light of the sun: although we cannot look at it directly, it is
nevertheless by the light of the sun that we see. If we are to turn
towards the sunlight, we must also turn away from the cult of the
common man and return to the uncommon man, to the hero. We all need
heroes, and here again we can learn from the child's acceptance of
the fact that he needs someone beyond himself to look up to.
Physiologically our backbones are not made for standing upright--one
reason we human beings have so much back trouble. We have the
backbones of four-footed animals, and had our ancestors limited
themselves to their capacity, we would still be down on all fours,
and therefore incapable of picking up a flower, a strange stone, a
book, and holding it in front of our eyes. [But gorillas can do
that, can't they?]
The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much
more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by
thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of
the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.
But this is the Age, among other things, of the Anti-hero. This is
the Age of Do-it-yourself: Do-it-yourself Oil Paintings: Just Follow
the Numbers; Do-it-yourself Home Organ Lessons; Do-it-yourself
Instant Culture.
But I can't do it myself. I need a hero. A hero shows me what
fallible man, despite and even with his faults, can do: I cannot do
it myself; and yet I can do anything: not as much of a paradox as it
might seem.
In looking towards a hero, we are less restricted and curtailed in
our own lives. A hero provides us with a point of reference.
Miss Clapp for me was a point of reference, not nearly as much
because of what she taught me directly as because of what she was.
All teachers must face the fact that they are potential points of
reference. The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the
courage to be; if we ARE, we make mistakes; we say too much where we
should have said nothing; we do not speak where a word might have
made all the difference. If we are, we will make terrible errors.
But we still have to have the courage to struggle on, trusting in our
own points of reference to show us the way.
# Chapter 4
Whether we like this world or not, whether we consider it progress or
not, whether we think it one of the most exciting and challenging
times in the history of mankind or not, it is here. This is a fact
we cannot change by any form of escapism, nihilism, secularity, or
do-it-yourself-ism.
We can't absorb it all. We know too much, too quickly, and one of
the worst effects of this avalanche of technology is the loss of
compassion.
We are lost unless we can recover compassion, without which we will
never understand charity. We must find, once more, community, a
sense of family, of belonging to each other.
Marshall McLuhan speaks of the earth as being a global village, and
it is, but we have lost the sense of family which is an essential
part of a village.
Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion
is particular; it is never general.
It is no coincidence that just at this point in our insight into our
mysteriousness as human beings struggling towards compassion, we are
also moving into an awakened interest in the language of myth and
fairy tale. The language of logical argument, of proofs, is the
language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the
language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the
imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I
must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith.
We are finite human beings, with finite minds; the intellect, no
matter how brilliant, is limited; we must go beyond it in our search
for truth.
Most of us feel this way. If you don't agree with me you don't
understand. But it takes a child to admit it. Today there is much
loose talk about communication and about truth, and little
understanding of what either one of them is. The language which is
ontological rather than intellectual, has little to do with the
"linguistic sciences," which tend to smother language... The
linguistic sciences' emphasis on simplifying communication produces
the odd result of so complicating it that we evade it entirely.
The primary needs can be filled without language. We can eat, sleep,
make love, build a house, bear children, without language. But we
cannot ask questions. We cannot ask, "Who am I? Who are you? Why?"
One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever
someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal. A
journal is not a diary, where you record the weather and the
engagements of the day. A journal is a notebook in which one can,
hopefully, be ontological.
A little more pragmatically, a journal, at least one that is not
written for publication, is a place where you can unload, dump, let
go. It is, among other practical things, a safety valve. If I am
out of proportion and perspective, then once I have dumped it all in
the journal, I am able to move from subjectivity to at least an
approach to objectivity, and my family has been spared one of
Madeleine's excessive moods. A journal is also a place in which joy
gets recorded, because joy is too bright a flame in me not to burn if
it doesn't get expressed in words.
Sometimes i answer that if I have something I want to say that is too
difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for
children. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of
the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They
are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth.
So with books. A childish book, like a childish person, is limited,
unspontaneous, closed in, certainly doesn't appeal to a true grownup.
But the childlike book, like the childlike person, breaks out of all
boundaries. Here again joy is the key.
But a great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe
it or to agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.
It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to
confuse the two.
One summer Hugh and I went, more or less by accident, to a burlesque
show. We'd gone down to the Village to see an off-Broadway play in
which a friend was appearing, found that he was out that night
because he'd strained his back. We thought we'd rather wait to see
the show when he returned to it, and directly across the street was a
marquee proclaiming Ann Corio in This Is Burlesque.
"How about it?"
"Fine."
It was great fun. A series of pretty young girls came out on stage
and danced while removing their clothing. I was filled with envy not
so much for their lovely bodies as for the way they could twirl the
tassels on their breasts: clockwise, counter-clockwise
(widdershins!): it was superb.
Towards the end of the performance one stripper came out who was a
little older than the others, possibly a little beyond her prime.
But she had a diaphanous scarf in her hands, and she twirled and
swirled this about her as she removed her clothes, and Hugh remarked,
"She's beautiful." It was only she, of all the strippers, who gave
the audience a feeling of mystery.
If we accept the mysterious as the "fairest thing in life," we must
also accept the fact that there are rules to it. A rule is not
necessarily rigid and unbending; it can even have a question mark at
the end of it. I wish we worried more about asking the right
questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers.
One of my favorite theologians is Albert Einstein. He writes, "The
fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true
science. He who knows it not, who can no longer wonder, can no
longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle."
... when the real thing is accepted, the desire for the cheap
substitute goes [away]. Something for something is far more
satisfying than something for nothing. "Take what you want, said
God," runs an old Spanish saying. "Take it, and pay for it."
I read lots of adult novels when I was a child; the parts about sex
were mostly outside my vocabulary and definitely outside my
experience; I didn't understand them and slid over them. Unless a
grownup, looking horrified, tells us that we shouldn't read a book
because it is "dirty," we, as children, won't even see the dirt
because it is outside our field of vision; we have not yet been
corrupted by repressive taboos. And children are a great deal less
naïve and fragile than many adults give them credit for being.
Whatever the contemporary taboos may be, all great books are imbued
with Einstein's quality of the mysterious, and keep its rules.
A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and
culture in which it is created, so final judgment on a current book
has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.
Toby isn't afraid to stick his neck out; he doesn't try to play it
safe. He doesn't depend on Trendex rather than his own opinion.
Because he is, thank God, human, he sometimes makes mistakes; but he
wouldn't be where he is now if his opinion hadn't far more often been
right than wrong. Or if he hadn't been willing to take risks for
what he believes in.
In a moment of crisis we don't act out of reasoned judgment but on
our conditioned reflexes. A driver prevents an accident because of
his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than
thought.
I'm convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis,
too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision
we've made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors; as our
points of reference. If slow and reasoned decisions are generally
wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too.
If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will those of the sudden
situation.
If we accept the responsibility of a situation, there is a response,
whether we know it or not, and whether it's the response we
expect--or want. Perhaps we may be required to die with our friend?
Suppose the strange little iceberg that is the human mind (the
largest part submerged, ignored, feared) is also likened to a living
radio or television set. With our conscious, surface selves we are
able to tune in only at a very few wave lengths. But there are
others, and sometimes in our dreams will will pick up a scene from a
distant, unknown, seemingly non-rational channel--but is it
non-rational? Or is it in another language, using metaphors and
similes with which we are not yet familiar.
"Consciousness expanding" is part of the current jargon.
We don't hurt ourselves--except aesthetically, which is not to be
taken lightly--by drinking instant coffee or eating powdered eggs,
but we do hurt ourselves when we try to take shortcuts to find out
who we are, and what [where] our place in the universe [is].
Not that I am against consciousness expanding: I want as much of my
little iceberg as possible out in the full light of the sun, and I
want to be clearly aware of the beautiful country beneath the waters.
All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced
that they will take us further, and more consciously, than
[psychedelic] drugs. For me, writing is one. But so is reading the
great writers. ... And so are our dreams. I want to remember them,
not so that I can recount them at boring length, but so that I will
be less insular, less afraid to travel in foreign lands. We are very
foolish if we shrug and patronizingly consider that these voyages are
not real.
Only a human being can say "I'm sorry. Forgive me." This is part of
our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears,
capable of laughter. [Give yourself to love if love is what you're
after. Open up your heart to tears and laughter. --Kate Wolf]
Possibly nothing he could have done for me, myself, would have
illuminated the world for me as did this act of love towards those I
love. Because of this love, this particular (never general)
Christian love, my intellectual reservations no longer made the least
difference. I had seen love in action, and that was all the proof I
needed.
I do not understand the mysteries of the flesh, but I know that we
must not be afraid to reach out to each other, to hold hands, to
touch.
... again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for
time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are,
we are full in ISness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the ISness of
the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes
enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the
painter at his easel, Serken playing the Appassionata, are in kairos.
The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother
reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos. The bush,
the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the very
particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the
bush I pass on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which
is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake. We too often let it
fall asleep, not as the baby in my arms droops into sleepiness, but
dully, bluntingly.
I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both
kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some
cybernetic salad on the bottom left-hand corner of a check; or my
social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known
by name: Madeleine.
The baby doesn't know about chronos yet.
The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we
must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.
author: L'Engle, Madeleine, 1918-2007
LOC: PS3523.E55 Z5
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Madeleine_L'Engle
tags: book,biography,memoires,non-fiction
title: A Circle of Quiet
# Tags
book
biography
memoires
non-fiction
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