Returning to a Book and Finding Yourself
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For a number of reasons, Iāve been rereading a few books. Itās been enjoyable, rediscovering turns of phrase and plot twists and characters stuck so deeply in memory, you forget they were hiding out in all their clarity until prodded againāand once reawoken, itās as if youād first experienced them yesterday, not decades ago. Edith Hamiltonās Mythology, Roberto Calassoās Cadmus and Harmonyāand in the past couple of days, Madeleine LāEngleās A Wrinkle in Time have all reminded me why I loved them in the first place.
I pulled the last one off the library shelf to see whether Iād accurately recalled or just misremembered a scene that appeared in my consciousness out of nowhere. It wasnāt in the bookābut I also checked out the next two in the series that got underway with Wrinkle, not being sure which volume might have contained the scene in question. After all, I read that trilogy (expanded since then into a quintet) so often that until that vivid memory came back, theyād all blurred into one story-feeling. And though I didnāt find what I was looking for, I was amazed to be just as intensely caught up in the adventureās grip this time around as I had been in the fourth grade.
I was also, though, pleasantly unsettled. Mrs. Whoās inability to stop quoting things in other languages, Charles Wallaceās wicked vocabulary and insight into the cause of peopleās jealous hatred, all the protagonistsā failure to fit in everywhere but in the dangerous fight for good: it all gave rise to the uncanny feeling that this was the book that formed me, or that at least set me in some definitive way on the path to becoming the language-loving ethicist Iāve turned into. And reading it now as an adult, I canāt possibly see how as a child I would have consciously recognized the references LāEngleās making throughout, from her biblical citations to (Iām guessing) the play entailed in the name of the planet that hosts the evil brain. Camazotz sounds, after all, a lot like a bumbled Camelot, the anti-utopia where āthe rain may never fall till after sundownā for entirely different reasons in each place.1
I probably didnāt pick up, then, on many a thing that wouldāve been obvious to educated adults. But what I realize Iāve held all this time so deeply that it feels intuitive is the way that LāEngle depicts what a serious, responsibility-laden, far-from-frivolous thing love is. The only force that sends you to risk your own safety and life, not in a swashbuckling frenzy, but rather when youāre terrified and would rather just hide. Megās rescue of Charles Wallace is a largely untheorized example of how Martin Luther King Jr. described love five years after Wrinkle was published: as āultimately the only answer to mankindās problemsā¦. Iām not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, Iām talking about a strong, demanding loveā¦. we are moving through wrong when we [love].ā And the force of its opposite is there, too, in the way that hatred is a welcome player for the big brain of evil, one that for those it inhabits, ādoes something to their faces and their personalitiesā and not only lulls them into submission to evil, but also shows that such submission comes with its own human costs, āthat hate is too great a burden to bear.ā2 Yes, yes, this is all nice, and weāve heard it over and over againābut itās easy to say, and easy to dismiss, because the love that these two authors are talking about is so damn hard to live into.
Iāve often gotten the sense that a book finds you when you need it. Why, I wondered yesterday, peering into one possible source of why I am the way I am, did this one find me now?
I was talking last week with a friend about what it is Iāve kept from a religious upbringing, here and now in my areligious present. Most salient in that conversation was its insistence that love as real demand be taken seriously. Not in terms of sappy or dogmatic atonement narratives that enforce rules for good behavior, but something like the realization that if Iām to go honorably through the world, doing my best to protect the planet and so forth, I canāt hate the people around me. I canāt sneer at the neighborhood idiots who blast fireworks in their backyards just because itās Wednesday; I canāt wish ill upon the ones whose outdoor stereos pound my own home with bass on the weekends or who leave their cars idling for twenty minutes at a time just puffing out CO2 because they can. I canāt dismiss all doings with the cranky right-winger because Iām set on seeing him as an irredeemable asshole. None of that is to say that accountability for these jagoffsā actions shouldnāt be maintainedābut in seeking ways for us to live together amicably, I canāt hate them for their preferences or pastimes, or cluelessness or lack of consideration, or even their ugly political convictions. Even more than that, and more than as a commitment to restore civility in the service of functioning governance, Iām supposed to love them. And given the way that love isnāt just an obligation-free warm feeling, I donāt even know what that could mean, and certainly know Iām far from capable of practicing it: a near-impossible exercise in answering what Simon Critchley might call an infinite demand.3
The conversation and the book, then, are related. LāEngle was the sort of liberal Christian evangelicals love to hate; on the other hand, readers whoāll shut a book at the first hint of religion popping up will be disgusted that in this volume, the writer neither hides her beliefs nor pushes them as even a theme that could be explicitly named.
Oddly enough, I wasnāt at all disturbed or disappointed at understanding what she was doing. If weāre going to bother to write something, why in the world should we pretend to be someone other than we are, to pretend to hold or not convictions that make us who we are? The key here, I think, is LāEngleās lack of dogmatism or fervor to convert anyone or claim exclusive access to truth. That, combined with bits such as the directive to Meg to hold onto her faults and "stay angry;" with the writer's openness to other worlds and ways of being, as seen in all the different sorts of good creatures the travelers come across.4 Yes, they seem to hold to the Christian spark in their own ways, but in another authorās hands, I wouldāve been rolling my eyes and railing at peopleās need to force Jesus down our throats.
The next two volumes await me, and Iāll see whether (and hope that) my appreciation holds. If nothing else, LāEngle can spin an engrossing tale, and in a world where there are already too many words, and too many put together badly, Iād say thatās a massive gift in itself.
1. The lyrics are from Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loeweās āCamelot,ā recorded in 1960 by CBS. See AllMusicals.com: https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/camelot/camelot.htm. I think itās also fantastic that the brain, called āIT,ā would now probably be heard-read as āI.T.,ā able to serve as an indicator of both the ultra Borg-like rationalism LāEngle originally called out and the multiple tech menaces that do their own gigantic part to dehumanize the present.ā©
2. Martin Luther King Jr., āWhere Do We Go from Here?ā in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington (HarperOne, 1992), 176.ā©
3. See Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2008) and the follow-up, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso, 2012).ā©
4. Madeleine LāEngle, A Wrinkle in Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 94.ā©