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September 10, 2007
There was such a Person Named Madeleine L'Engle
Madeline L'Engle's thoughts will be sorely missed.
"A Wrinkle in Time" was not the sort of book you were assigned in school; with its New Testament quotations and witchy supporting characters it was at once too Christian and too blasphemous. It was the sort of book you discovered on your own, shelved as it was in the big kids' section, and that you read ferociously into the night with a mug of Swiss Miss -- a replica of Meg's homemade cocoa. You didn't talk about the book at school. Meg's awkwardness, her anger, her imperfections were too intensely private, too attuned to your own gangly self-loathing. As with "Bridge to Terabithia" or the Ramona Quimby series, you wondered, perhaps, if it had been written for you.
You learned about tesseracts -- those convenient shortcuts that made dimension-skipping possible for Meg, her genius little brother Charles Wallace, and her boyfriend, Calvin, who saw behind her dorky specs a pair of "dreamboat eyes." You also learned about Einstein's theory of relativity, a smattering of Latin and a goodly amount of Shakespeare.
Woven through every story line: the unfailing message to be yourself, delivered not in a syrupy parental way but in a jarring and often scary one. In "Wrinkle" the trio travels to the planet Camazots, where children can be euthanized for bouncing a ball out of rhythm and society is controlled by a giant, pulsing brain called IT. Attempting to resist conformity, Meg recites the Declaration of Independence, only to have IT reply that "all men are created equal" is exactly the point: On Camazots "everybody is the same as everybody else."
"No!" Meg shouts triumphantly. " Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"
(via washington post)
Posted by Groonk at September 10, 2007 05:33 AM | Ministry of Books, People Who Died
