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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cleolinda | |
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Madeleine L'Engle dies at the age of 88. I happened to check Fandom Lounge, saw this, and my mouth fell open for some reason. I loved L'Engle, although I haven't gotten through half as many books as I'd like. I even saw her speak when I was in seventh or eighth grade (which must have been in the neighborhood of 1992-1993); I was a library aide at school, and the librarians took all of us to see her when she was in town. I want to say she spoke in a church, because I seem to remember sitting with the other aides in a balcony. I was surprised by how she looked--like a very cheerful energetic grandmother, a grandmother who might go climb a mountain when she was finished with her speaking engagement. In fact, I think she talked about penguins and the Antarctic, and I notice that some ten years after that, Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and other Spiritual Places was published. For some reason, A Swiftly Tilting Planet was my favorite book in the Time Quartet as a kid--yes, over A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, although I loved the covers of all my copies--but A Ring of Endless Light was probably my favorite overall. I remember reading it one bright summer, a summer that "Red Red Wine" was on the radio all the time (although really, that could be many different summers), and I always associate the two. If I'm reading the book, I hear the song; if I hear the song, I think of the book, and that light, white afternoon I finished it in my little upstairs room with the roof shaped like a barn's. Just something to leave you with, from that news link: "In my dreams, I never have an age," she said. "I never write for any age group in mind. When people do, they tend to be tolerant and condescending and they don't write as well as they can write. When you underestimate your audience, you're cutting yourself off from your best work." It's probably not the most profound thing a very profound writer ever said, but I believe it.      Tags: books, deaths, writers
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I just read this news on another journal. This is what I wrote in response --
I'm sitting here with tears running down my face. Is it silly to love someone you've never met, who's never met you? Because I loved -- love -- Madeleine L'Engle.
I think I was nine when I first read A Wrinkle in Time (I am seventeen now), and I remember being incredibly moved by it in a way that I had never been moved by a book before. It felt important. It felt real. It had a weight that no other book I had previously read had carried. I have worn my copy nearly to pieces, reading it and re-reading it in the years since. Later I read some of her other books for children (the rest of the Time Quartet, some of the Austin books), and loved them, because they were beautiful, because they had that weight, and that joy, and because she is one of the only writers I have encountered who can write about God in the frame of a novel organically and beautifully and eloquently, without it feeling like a bit of lace frill sewn on at the end.
There are some writers, you know, whom you love to read, and maybe you live in their books sometimes, and maybe they mean something -- but then there are other writers whose writings are bits of you -- they're writers of your heart and they get into your soul and take roost there gently and irrevocably, and something about them is like being home, except it's a home you didn't know was home and it turns out it's more widely and fully home than the house you're living in. For me, she was one of those.
This spring, I happened upon a book of hers at the Goodwill. I knew vaguely that she'd written some non-fiction, but I'd never read any of it. The book was Two-Part Invention, the story of her marriage to Hugh Franklin. I bought it and took it home and read it, and I have never been quite the same since. I was so deeply -- oh, moved isn't even the word at all. I was very very quiet for a long time, and then I went out and took a walk. I wrote on my LiveJournal,
"The thoughts, the ideas, the stories and pains and joys and how L'Engle writes about them and what she writes about them -- it's the sort of book that one has to recover from afterwards; you come out of it slowly, blinking at the brightness of the light, and you are very, very quiet for a few minutes afterwards, because you don't want to leave it, and because you have so much to ponder and to understand. I sat very still, wanting to know that kind of love, and that kind of trust, and faith, and strength, and wanting to be able to make others feel them as if the sorrows and joys belonged to them -- if I can't do that, then I can't be a writer. I took a walk. It's Spring, as you have no doubt heard, and I love early evening, all pale and sharp-smelling and quiet and still, so I walked around the neighbourhood in the chilly March air and thought, not just about what I'd read, but everything, everything that there was to think of."
Since then, Madeleine L'Engle has been real to me (and she has been making God real and beautiful to me through her books). I discovered her novels for adults, and have been attempting to make my way through her entire bibliography. Aside from her "Crosswicks Journals", the four-part autobiographical sort-of series which concluded with Two-Part Invention, I've especially loved The Other Side of the Sun and Certain Women so far.
I only wish I could have met her on this earth. See you in heaven, Madeleine.
(I have always loved A Swiftly Tilting Planet in particular, too -- all those intertwining stories, and the Welsh. But each of her books that I have read has felt incredibly personal to me, in some odd way; it's difficult to choose favourites because they all mean something and they all managed to get into some corner of my consciousness and being and alter it.)
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Wow. This makes me feel a little melancholy. I read a lot, and I'm relatively not picky, so I don't really have a favorite author, but Madeleine L' Engle is definitely one the writers I admire the most. I use the present tense, because I know she will live on through her writing and the many people that love it. I've always thought in the back of my mind that I would love to write to her, or meet her somehow, but I never did. Her writing was just so- pure, and heartfelt, and it includes all of the things I want to be present in my writing. Also, there didn't seem to be much barrier between what she did with her life and wrote in her books, which I think is the essence of authorship- the undiluted communication of one's soul and beliefs. She also seems incredibly well-rounded in her interests, doing intellectual and wonderfully romantic, old-fashioned things like you see her characters do in the books. For example, listening to Holtz's The Planets, or making cocoa in a saucepan on the stove, or living in a glorious old farmhouse in the quaint, yet slightly pretentious and untouchable atmosphere of New England. Obviously, the Time Quartet and an Acceptable Time are my favorites of hers, although I did love a Ring of Endless Light and the one with Vicki and the North... Troubling a Star, that's it. I've read a couple of her "grown-up" books, but I need to read more.
Anyhoo- if you read this, thanks for caring about my mindless, unedited outpouring of feelings.
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