I Am Tired Of Hearing That Favorite Authors Have Died Please Stop KTHXBYE
The first real book I can remember reading was A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I was in second grade, and, like many seven-year-old girls, I was infatuated with unicorns. This book had a unicorn on the cover. It had to be good.
The unicorn did not, however, show up in Chapter One. Instead there was a long scene involving a boring family dinner at which boring politics were discussed. At age seven, I wasn’t particularly cognizant of the Cold War and the arms race and everyone’s fears of nuclear war. I certainly wasn’t aware of the parallels between these and the worries expressed by the family in Chapter One of A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Heck, Ronald Reagan was just a synonym for U.S. President in my mind. I was all about the unicorns. And that dang unicorn hadn’t shown up yet.
My mother discovered me on my third or fourth attempt to get through Chapter One. She suggested, gently, that maybe this book was a tad bit above my current reading level, and that I might enjoy reading A Wrinkle In Time instead. It was by the same author, after all. It was certainly easier to read.
If Mom had instead told me that A Wrinkle In Time was the first book in the trilogy of which …Planet was Book 3, I would have set the latter aside with a quickness and turned my attention to the former. But she didn’t. Instead she implied that my reading skills weren’t yet up to the snuff required by …Planet. Look, you try saying that to a headstrong youngster and see where it gets you. Same place it gets you if you say something similar to a headstrong adult, right?
To this day I am not entirely sure Mom didn’t say what she said in order to goad me towards success. It certainly worked. “I’ll show her,” I thought, and I buckled down and finished that boring old Chapter One. And the unicorn showed up straightaway in Chapter Two.
So there you have it. My mother conspired with Madeleine L’Engle to keep me from giving up on a good book.
Now, I’m not precisely a L’Engle fan. While I’ve read and reread the Time Trilogy, as those two books and A Wind In The Door are often called, uncountable times, finding more to fascinate and inspire me with each reading, I was disappointed in my reading of An Acceptable Time and my rereading of Many Waters. I found those less rewarding to the adult reader I’d become, their language more patronizing and their concepts more simplistic. And beyond those five books, I’ve read very little else by L’Engle, certainly little that sticks in memory.
But one doesn’t have to like an authors entire repertoire to be forever changed by that beloved fraction of it. The supremacy of Love (”What could she do that It couldn’t? She could love”), the importance in the grand scheme of every creature great and small (”Listen: For want of a nail, the shoe was lost…”), the constant shifting of the boundary between real and imaginary (”What is real?”), the necessary impermanence of every experience (”You humans want things to last. They don’t”). These things stayed with me.
And it wasn’t just the thematic content of the books that took up permanent residence in my head. When I got to the climax of A Wind In The Door and L’Engle’s prose gave way, in the emotion of the moment, to free verse, it was an epiphany. Wow, you can do that? Really? In the middle of a novel you can just start spouting poetry? And a line of poetry can be one word long? Wow! I’d already started to write stories in my school notebooks; I now started experimenting with L’Engle-style poetry. One of my sixth-grade attempts is hanging up in my parents’ living room to this day. (It has unicorns in it.)
I owe a lot to Madeleine L’Engle, who died this past Thursday at the age of 88. She was one of the earliest shapers of my imagination–of the imaginations of an entire generation of children–and she will very much be missed.