Tesser Well: In Praise of "A Wrinkle in Time"

Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time was published 50 years ago this month.  Many of us already know the difficulty that she had in getting the book published; my memory is that she sent it out for 10 years before it was accepted, and even then, the publisher had deep misgivings.

It's one of those classic publishing tales that gives us all hope.  The author believed deeply in the book, which was published against all odds; the book went on to win prizes and has never been out of print since.  Tomorrow I'll write more about L'Engle.  Today, I want to think about the book that started my L'Engle obsession.

I remember that my 5th grade classroom had a small bookcase.  We were welcome to read any of the books there.  I was a voracious reader who was always on the prowl for something to read.  One day, I pulled A Wrinkle in Time off the shelf.  I'd thought about reading it before, but something put me off.  However, on that spring day, I had no other choices that looked better.   And so, I decided to give the book a try.

Right away, I was hooked by the main character Meg, who was stubborn and bossy and plain, but bewitching to a boy named Calvin.  I loved Meg's family.  I wanted to know what happened to their father.  And wow, what a story that was.

Did I understand the physics?  Can I tell you what it means to tesseract?  I didn't then, but I read lots of stuff I didn't understand--it never stopped me.  No, in fact, it stretched me.  We worry to much about what kids can and can't understand, although I am in favor of some censoring if the violence in a work is too graphic.  But rejecting a book because of the physics?  Never.

Some have rejected the book because of the spiritual elements.  Those elements didn't hit me as a child.  I imagine that when I reread the book in the next few months, I'll wonder why I didn't see them.  But as a child, the religious symbolism of many books didn't hit me.  For example, I read all of the Chronicles of Narnia and rarely glimpsed the allegory.  I just loved the story.  I wanted an enchanted wardrobe with a world behind it.

Luckily, I had that wardrobe--grown ups would call them books, but I saw them as a magical way to transport me to other places.  L'Engle did that transporting better than most children's authors.

Of course, it helped that she didn't see herself as a children's author.  She wrote for everyone, and that's one reason why we got books that didn't talk down to children.  She knew that children could handle big topics like love vs. totalitarian thinking; she didn't flinch.

I am grateful, profoundly grateful, to authors like L'Engle, authors who have split my world open again and again.  I am grateful to authors who take me to other places and to those books, such a cheap way of exploring other worlds.  I would love to be one of those writers who creates a book like A Wrinkle in Time--and now that I have a nephew who's getting to the elementary school reading age, maybe I will.

For a great retrospective of the book, head to this NPR site where you'll find a link to the All Things Considered piece on A Wrinkle in Time.

Tomorrow:  more about L'Engle and her inspirations as a writer and creative person.

From Detritus, Sturdy Shoots Can Grow

Yesterday I got to do one of the favorite aspects of my job:  I got to go on a field trip with a class.  Yesterday, I went with a Biology class to the Ann Kolb Nature Center in Broward County.

The Ann Kolb Nature Center is an amazing place, a preserve of mangrove trees and natural habitat.

I love the casual feel of a field trip, and I'm always humbled at how welcome I feel, both by the students and by the faculty member.  After all, it's not all pleasure for me. I'm there to observe the field trip, much the way I'd conduct a classroom observation.

How wonderful it is to get away from my office world of computer screens.  How great to learn new things.  For example, mangrove trees are one of the few specimens that can tolerate having wet roots in brackish water.  They thrive on this condition that would kill most trees.

And they're one of the few trees that can move.  Well, not exactly like you and I move.  But by sending out new roots, they'll appear to have moved inches or feet away from where they started out.

I learned about detritus, that delightful muck created mainly by decomposing leaves.  This detritus makes a great incubator of new trees.

We learned about how the trees grow a bulbous thing that helps them heal from things that bite them.  As one student said, "Scabs!"

We didn't see much wildlife.  Often, the protected nature of the park means that birds find shelter, but not yesterday.  We saw a bird of prey overhead and a lone seagull and some birds that may have been herons.

I never took these kind of field trips when I was in college Biology classes.  We did dissecting, but we never got out of the building to have the naturalist's experience of observing the natural world.  What a shame!

One of the reasons why our Science students get to go on these field trips is because we're not really set up in terms of our lab to do dissection.  So, out of necessity, Science faculty created these great excursions.  Our Marine Science and Oceanography students routinely go snorkeling to see the coral reefs before they disappear.  Science faculty go to local parks, like the Ann Kolb Nature Center, and they go to explore the Everglades.

Higher Ed folks spend a lot of time trying to decide whether or not we're offering the same kind of rigorous education that colleges and universities used to give students.  As I go on field trips, I can say that on some level, students are getting a better Science education than I got.  And in many cases, they get to see habitats that aren't found throughout most of the rest of the U.S.; we have unique coral reefs, and since mangroves can't tolerate cold, very few other students will have a chance to learn about them by touching them and tasting them.

Yes, tasting the leaves--some mangroves deal with excess salt by extracting them through their leaves.  Students weren't forced to lick the leaves, of course.  They could simply observe the salt deposits.

I'm certain that I never interacted with the natural world in that way when I was a student.  It was great to remember that some of the administrator work that I do behind the scenes enables these kind of student interactions with the natural world.

Ride the Divide!

Today in spin class, we did something very different; we watched the second part of the documentary Ride the Divide, a documentary about a group of people who competed to see who could be the first to ride from Canada to Mexico on their bikes.

Now we're not talking about the Tour de France, when people ride in groups, with support teams to provide food, hydration and medical help.  No, these riders were mostly out there pedalling away on their own.

It's interesting that what defeated riders most often was the loneliness or the boredom, not the exertion or injury or not having enough training.  We saw one of the riders confessing that the scenery was lovely, but she was just so bored, too bored to face another day.

I thought of my own days and how often I feel a similar way.  I thought of my childhood dreams of hiking the Appalachian Trail from beginning to end or riding a bike from coast to coast, the way so many people did during the summer of 1976.  It's good to remember that even if I was out there on a bike or with a backpack, I'd still face the problem of boredom.

I'd go a step further and say that boredom defeats many of us more quickly than lack of skill or lack of talent or lack of resources.  How many writers (or artists of any kind) have quit because they could not face another day alone with their thoughts?  How many marriages and families have been abandoned when the tedium became too great?  How many jobs have been left because at least the boredom in a new job would be unfamiliar, at least for a few months?

I daresay many of us if not most of us are never trained with the coping skills we need to keep at a task, especially if the rewards are few and far between or largely self-rewarded.

Now, an enterprising blogger would end with an upbeat suggestion for how to cope with boredom--or a 3 part podcast, available for download for a very modest price, or a book!  I am not that enterprising blogger this morning.  I write mainly to remind myself that even if I was out there living my childhood dream, I'd still face the problem of what to do with all the boredom.

Scenes from a Saturday

--I was with a group of friends yesterday, and we played the Righteous Gentile game described by Nathan Englander:  in the event of Holocaust, who would hide me and who would turn me in?

--Of course, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" warns us of what can happen when a group casually plays this game.  Happily, my group of friends remains on speaking terms.  I think.

--We did generate intense conversation.  We did remind each other of how other groups, most specifically groups which help abused women escape, have managed to hide endangered humans and stay safe.

--I posed the question this way, "Let's say the government decides to exterminate Lutherans.  Would you hide me?"  Posed that way, the question is almost humorous, especially since Lutherans are probably one of the least dangerous religious groups in the U.S.  We tried to remind each other that even though the government has yet to set its sights on Lutherans, other groups, like immigrants both legal and illegal, are often not so lucky.

--I am aware of the school of theology that says if we were living truly Christian lives, we would be on a direct collision course with our government.  To say that Lutherans are the least dangerous Christian group probably means we should be stepping up our efforts as Christians.

--I came home to watch the movie Beginners.  Christopher Plummer won an Academy Award for this movie?  I don't usually think about quitting a movie once it's started, but I was sorely tempted last night.  Was I offended?  No.  Just bored.  What a slow-paced movie.  What a dull-witted main character.  It would have been better to focus only on the Christopher Plummer character, the older father of the main character.

--I did love the movie's transitional photo montages with narration:   "Here's the president in 1965; here's what pets looked like in 1965; here's what pets look like now; here's what love looked like in 1965; here's what love looks like now."

--The advantage to a boring movie is that one gets other things done.  I paid some bills and worked on my rock project.

--I'm in the process of creating a prayer chapel (see this post for more details).  My spouse and I have been creating rocks for the prayer chapel, rocks with words we've printed on them:

I really enjoyed creating them.  I have a vision of continuing to create them and leaving them in places.  It's a quiet form of performance art.

Dagger Twists: Art as Comfort, Art as Prod

I've written about Nathan Englander in several blog posts (here on my creativity blog and here on my theology blog), and now I've finally gotten the book What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.  Last night I read the short story that bears the same name--wow!

At first the story struck me as humorous, which it is.  I wasn't ready for the dagger twist at the end.  I expect to think about it for many days, but I won't write more about it, because I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't read it yet.

There's a scene where the characters go into a huge pantry and talk about how it could be turned into a hidden space, should the family ever need to shelter people being hunted by the government.  This conversation is in the context of Jews being hidden from Hitler, but it made me think of other situations.

My all-time favorite Marge Piercy novel is Vida, about a leftist activist named Vida who on the run from the government in the early 70's; she's gone underground and relies on her friends who aren't similarly compromised to shelter her and help her.  It's a great depiction of the student movements of the 60's and how some of them moved into terrorism; as you might expect, one of the central questions of the book centers around how we should protest when we feel our government is wrong.  It also explores why some women moved towards feminism while some didn't.

When I first read it in 1987, I wondered how it would hold up through the years.  I've read it several times since then, and it's always held up well.  Even the domestic terrorism theme continued to work, which I wondered about with the terrorist events of Oklahoma City and September 11.

I've long had a plot in my head, which I may never develop into the novel that it could be, that would have a right wing terrorist and a left wing terrorist hook up.  I had this vision of a feminist woman in the North Carolina mountains and a wounded man who shows up talking about his work against the government.  She assumes he's a lefty, but later finds out that he's been bombing abortion clinics.

Maybe I should see how it works as a short story.  Hmm.

I've also been thinking about this article by Andrea Chalupa which explores Orwell's fight to get Animal Farm published and to get it into the hands of Soviet dissidents in Ukrainian translation in displaced persons camps, an angle of this book's history I knew nothing about.  I'm used to thinking of this novel as a classic; I sometimes forget that classics have a bumpy road to acceptance.

But what fascinates me more is the depiction of art as both comfort and agent of social change and resistance.  And then there's the question of whether or not art is required to forge new ground, whether it be political or social.

In this review of Englander's collection, Parul Sehgal says, "Even if it revisits terrain exhaustively explored by other American Jewish writers, Englander unwittingly makes us wonder: If a writer takes Jewishness as his subject, is he obligated to tell us something new about Jewishness? Or is he only obligated to describe Jewish characters in the most precise language he can, putting them in the most psychologically revealing situations he can imagine? Such questions — irresolvable, hairsplitting, Talmudic — prove more satisfying than the answers posed by a more perfect book."


For those of you who don't like these kind of philosophical questions, here's a great interview with Englander where he talks about his writing process.  It makes me want to get back to writing more fiction.

Here are some Nathan Englander quotes for your Saturday inspiration:

"I promise you that there is no end to the pulling-out-handfuls-of-hair, woe-is-me, there-is-no-hope structural challenges that I can find myself wrestling with when writing a story. But you’re asking if it was liberating to work with very limited elements, and the answer is: Wildly so. Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing it’s infinity that is limiting, and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end."

"But, in a case like this, what interests me when I’m writing is being able to crawl into a character’s head and speak from his or her mouth. It’s not pulling the strings on a marionette, it’s not playing ventriloquist, and it’s not mimicry. It’s about inhabiting a character, and, at the same time, being totally unaware of what you’ve become."

Happy Birthday, John Irving (and Garp and Owen Meany)

Today is John Irving's 70th birthday--70th!!!  I remember when John Irving was seen as a young, up-and-coming writer.  It's startling to me to realize how long he's been writing.

I picked up The World According to Garp at a used bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee when I was in high school.  I remember reading it and being somewhat shocked at the unhappiness of the suburban parents in the novel.  I remember being somewhat shocked by the sex in the novel, but I can't remember what was shocking.  I'd been reading bodice ripper romance novels for years by the time I picked up my first John Irving novel, and so, graphic depictions of lust and sex had lost their capacity to shock just by their graphic nature alone.

I also remember being shocked by some of the strange twists the novel took.  As I continued to read Irving novels, I came to expect a shocking twist, and part of the thrill of reading an Irving novel was in predicting which characters would die a freakish death or be maimed.

I used to read Irving novels the minute they came out--or as soon as I could get them from my public library during my impoverished grad school years.  These days, I have a stack of his recent books awaiting the mythical time in the future that I'll have time to read a big novel.

My favorite John Irving novel--and it's high on the list of my all-time favorite novels--is A Prayer for Owen Meany.  What an amazing book.  My spouse read it first, and then I read it, and then we loaned it to anyone who would take it.  We were Owen Meany evangelists.

I use that word with purpose because each time I've read the book, I've noticed that Owen Meany functions neatly as a Christ figure.  You might say, "Sure.  You're an English major.  You see sex and Christ figures in every work of literature or pop culture."  You'd be right, but Owen Meany works as a Christ figure more neatly than some characters in other works.

Maybe some day I'll write the academic paper that I once sketched out that made the argument.  Maybe some day I'll write a novel that has a main character who functions as a Christ figure.

I remember being struck by the main character, the non-Owen Meany character, and his trajectory through spiritual landscapes.  I remember being struck by the fact that Irving could write about this journey, and I remained interested instead of turned off.  I was similarly being struck by that ability in Gail Godwin.  It's not easy to write a book about characters who go to church and to make that book appealing to believers and non-believers alike.

It may be time to reread A Prayer for Owen Meany again.  I used to reread it on a regular basis.  I used to reread lots of books on a regular basis.  Ah, youth, when I had time to read and less to distract me from it.

I used to read Father Melancholy's Daughter by Gail Godwin regularly as a Holy Week book.  Maybe this year, I'll return to A Prayer for Owen Meany.  Maybe in the same week I'll reread A Wrinkle in Time, the novel by Madeleine L'Engle that moved me as a 5th grader when I first read it, and continued to affect me deeply when I'd reread it throughout adolescence.  I've been wanting to reread it for months now, and this year marks the 50th anniversary of its publication.   Reading the two in close proximity might lead to interesting insights.  I'll let you know.

Older and Out There

My sociologist friend had a colleague at a different institution ask her if she would review his paper which he warned her was "a little out there."

She immediately prepared herself.  She expected a sociological exploration of some sort of strange sexual practice, maybe several.  She thought she might get some sort of immodest proposal.  She was not prepared for mysticism. 

I use the term mysticism loosely, mainly because that's the term she used--and she used that term because he uses it.  Her colleague is really exploring ESP, astral projection, chakras, and he's claiming scientific credibility for them.  His use of the word "scientific" might be different from yours.

My stodgy Lutheran self objects to the way he slings the term "mystic" around.  My stodgy Lutheran self is comfortable with the Thomas Merton brand of mysticism, less so with the Teresa of Avila type.  My stodgy Lutheran self does not want to hear about the night when you astrally projected yourself to Cleveland.  My stodgy Lutheran self will not be cleansing her chakras, although she likes color theory as much as the next person.

My observational writer self is having a good laugh over all of this.  My sociologist friend is as devout an atheist as anyone I've ever met and devoted to the scientific method the way the Western world has been practicing it for centuries.  She would have known how to handle kinky stuff of all sorts--except religious kinks.  And then there's me, a lifelong Lutheran who is appalled despite the fact that I have flirted with New Agey and paranormal stuff.  I spent many years of early adolescence longing to have ESP.  When the phone would ring, I'd try to know who was calling.  I was always wrong.  I tried to bend spoons with the power of my mind.  Happily, the silverware was always safe with my paranormal powers.

Before I was the apocalypse gal, I wanted to be a witch.  I wanted to find a book of spells in the attic, but we lived in suburban houses that had no attic. 

So why am I so impatient with people who want to claim legitimacy for paranormal experience?  Is it because I see it as an adolescent urge?

And yes, I realize that plenty of people would dismiss my belief in a God that cares about creation as an adolescent yearning too.

It fascinates me to consider the human experiences that we consider "out there" and how that changes as we age. 

I have a different friend who has known for some time that a younger person was likely to come out at some point as homosexual.  When we were younger, that admission might have been considered "out there."  But we're older now and enlightened and now we see happy people all along the sexual spectrum on television. 

She was prepared to be supportive.  She was not prepared for the younger person to come out as being wrongly gendered and working toward sexual reassignment surgery. 

I think of myself at the age of 46 as being the last of the pre-plastic surgery generation.  When I was young, if you felt your body was wrong, you didn't have many options.  You could try diet and exercise if the part of your body that was wrong could be influenced that way.  But when I was younger, plastic surgery was prohibitively expensive.

Now some parents give their children plastic surgery as a graduation present.  To me, that's "out there." 

Yes, my stodgy Lutheran self would like us all to be comfortable in our physical bodies just the way that they are, the way that God made them.  When I figure out how to do that, I'll let you know.

My stodgy Lutheran self is amused to remember that for many people of my generation, the idea that God made our bodies as already perfect would be an "out there" concept.