A Circle of Quiet

by Madeleine L'engle

  The choir was completely volunteer, and completely ecumenical. Before ecumenism was “in,” we had Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Dutch Reform, Methodist, and Southern Baptist choristers, and all in the Congregational Church. Musically, I was certainly Episcopalian. It was the church into which I was born, and my father loved good church music. In New York as a child I was taken to church much as I was taken to the opera.

  I wanted the choir to be good. I wanted us to sing good music, and to be a success. Some of the volunteer singers had beautiful voices; one had a great one. Some of them couldn’t stay in tune and pulled the whole group down into a flat, sodden mass. One woman stayed in key, all right, but at full volume at all times, and with an unpleasant, nasal whine. If the choir was to be a success, the obvious first thing to do was to ease out some of the problem voices.

  I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why, but something told me that every single person in that choir was more important than the music. ‘But the music is going to be terrible,’ I wailed to this invisible voice. ‘That doesn’t matter. That’s not the reason for this choir.’ I didn’t ask what was, but struggled along. The extraordinary, lovely thing was that the music got to be pretty good, far better, I am now convinced, than it would have been if I’d put the music first and the people second. I suppose, long before I’d heard the word, I was being ontological.

  I did have subversive means of getting my own way about what music we sang. I’d bring out something I loved, Palestrina, for instance, and everybody would groan, so I’d put it away. A couple of weeks later I’d bring it out again, and someone would remark, “That’s kind of nice.” “I’m afraid it’s too difficult for us,” I’d say, and put it away again. Two more weeks, and out it would come, and someone would exclaim, “That’s beautiful! Can we learn that?” And we did, and everybody loved it. I, in my turn, learned to love some of the music I had felt “above.”

  As the choir developed, choice of music became limited by only one factor: Grandma, growing older, could no longer play in sharps. I felt great sympathy with her in this. Flats are lots easier than sharps for me, too. At first she could play in three sharps, then two, and finally none. Quinn, our young minister, would select hymns which fitted well with his sermon, and I’d have to say, “Sorry, Quinn, you can’t have that; it’s in four sharps.”

  And Grandma preferred major to minor. But, because we loved each other, that was no problem. I’d put my arm about her tiny, bowed little back (her legs could barely stretch to reach the organ pedals) and say, “Grandma, will you let us sing this, please? I know it’s minor, but we’ve done major anthems for three weeks, and I love this one.” “All right, Madeleine. For you.” I don’t think Grandma ever liked the minor anthems, but she played them most graciously.

  Grandma and the choir taught me something about persons, how to be a self myself, and how to honor the self in others.

  13

  One evening I went to choir rehearsal; in the morning’s mail had been a rejection slip. The choir was singing well, and I went to the back of the church to listen to the anthem and see if the voices were balanced, and caught myself thinking bitterly, “Is this all I’m good for? to direct a second-rate choir in a village church?”

  I was in that area of despair where one is incapable of being ontological. In my definition of the word, this is sin.

  14

  A winter ago I was asked by the Children’s Book Council to write a story, and agreed to do so. I was telling Tallis about it, and said, “I’m really very nervous about this.” He looked at me contemptuously: “You don’t think you’re going to have anything to do with it, do you?” “No,” I retorted, “but I could get in the way.” Mostly, while I was directing the choir, I didn’t get in the way, and I hadn’t yet reached the stage of either understanding or being self-conscious about such things. But getting in the way does bother me whenever I lead a seminar. It bothered me at O.S.U., and yet I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

  If I accept the fact that I, ontologically speaking, was born a writer, was named Madeleine, am an inextricable blend of writer, wife, mother, then my virtue, or talent, is quite aside from the point. When I accepted myself as Madeleine on my fortieth birthday, not a computer’s punch-out, or my social-security number, or the post-office date on the latest rejection slip, it had nothing to do with the degree of my talent. I could, during the long years of failure, console myself with the fact that van Gogh sold precisely one picture while he lived, and that he was considered an impossible painter. I could try to reassure my agent when he was concerned about the damaging effect on me of so much failure; he was afraid it would kill my talent. Can this happen? I don’t know, I just don’t know.

  I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their validity, no matter what. When I look back on that decade of total failure—it’s been a mixture, both before, and since—there was, even on the days of rejection slips, a tiny, stubborn refusal to be completely put down. And I think, too, and possibly most important, that there is a faith simply in the validity of art; when we talk about ourselves as being part of the company of such people as Mozart or van Gogh or Dostoevsky, it has nothing to do with comparisons, or pitting talent against talent; it has everything to do with a way of looking at the universe. My husband said, “But people might think you’re putting yourself alongside Dostoevsky.” The idea is so impossible that I can only laugh in incredulity. Dostoevsky is a giant; I look up to him; I sit at his feet; perhaps I will be able to learn something from him. But we do face the same direction, no matter how giant his stride, how small mine.

  During that dreadful decade I pinned on my workroom wall a cartoon in which a writer, bearing a rejected manuscript, is dejectedly leaving a publisher’s office; the caption says, “We’re very sorry, Mr. Tolstoy, but we aren’t in the market for a war story right now.” That cartoon got me through some bad hours. It didn’t mean that I was setting myself beside Tolstoy.

  On the other hand I was anything but comforted when Hugh thought to console me by pointing out some published stories which “aren’t nearly as good as yours. Doesn’t that make you feel better?” “Of course it doesn’t make me feel better!” I cried. “You’re absolutely right, I write much better than that. Why should it make me feel better to have bad writing published? If it were better than mine, then I wouldn’t mind, then I would feel better.”

  It was great writing which kept me going, the company of the Brontës, William Blake, Alexandre Dumas. But there’s still pride to fall over, not pride in the sense of self-respect, but in that Greek sense of hubris: pride against the gods; do-it-yourself-ism, which the Greeks understood to mean “I can do it myself just as well as, if not better than, the gods.” When my hubris gets pricked, I bleed; or at any rate my hubris bleeds. Mine is still sore from something a friend of mine, a friend of the right hand, whom we will call Will, said to me shortly before I went to Ohio: what Will said is that in group conversation I am apt to seem as though I were going to say something extremely important, and then come out with the obvious. I thought of this accusation while I was in Columbus. Certainly much of what I was fumblingly trying to say during the seminars was obvious. But the obvious needs to be said. Sometimes the obvious is so obscured by brilliant analysis that it gets lost.

  Am I trying, as I so often do, to rationalize? Do Will’s words still rankle—and they do—because the implication was not just that I come out with the obvious, but that my obvious is shallow? But the obvious need not be shallow. Sometimes it is profound and painful, and can be written off only by being called obvious. Not that I think that Will does this—he does not—but it can be a danger for any intellectual.

  In another conversation, Will and I discussed the peril of fal
ling into the trap of intellectual elitism. The older I grow, the more this insidious form of snobbery seems a snare and a delusion. We probably have more scientific knowledge at our fingertips today than ever before, and yet we are incapable of handling this knowledge creatively; we cannot avoid mutilating diseases, devastating wars, or control earthquake or tornado; and we are in grave danger of destroying our planet entirely because we cannot control what our intellect has unleashed, from cobalt bombs to polluting laundry detergents.

  More personally, my intellect is a stumbling block to much that makes life worth living: laughter; love; a willing acceptance of being created. The rational intellect doesn’t have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn’t have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the “superconscious” has already shown me in a story or poem. Facing this does help to eradicate do-it-yourself hubris from an artist’s attitude towards his painting or music or writing. My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me out into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.

  There’s a reason for that, chaps!

  While Alan was in school, his science teacher was an inept young man who kept blowing things up, remarking through the stench of chemical smoke and the crashing of broken glass, “There’s a reason for that, chaps.”

  I must be willing to accept the explosions which take place deep down in the heart of the volcano, sending up an occasional burst of flame into the daylight of consciousness.

  With my naked intellect I cannot believe in God, particularly a loving God. My intellect is convinced that any idea of the person’s continuing and growing after death is absurd; logic goes no further than dust to dust. Images, in the literary sense of the word, take me much further. Without my glasses I can see nothing but a vague blur. When I put them on, I become functional. But who is doing the seeing? The lenses of the spectacles are not. I am. There is an essential, ontological me—that part of me which is not consumed in the burning—which is (to use imagery again) that which I was created to be, the imaginative Adam and Eve as they were in the pre-history days of the Garden. Some of our children talk about going back to the garden; we can’t do that; but we can travel in the direction which will lead us to that place where we may find out who we really are.

  15

  Not long ago I was one of several “children’s writers” on a panel. I had not been told that we were expected to begin by making a statement as to why we write for children. Because of the seating arrangements, I was “on” second. The first writer had written down his reasons, and good ones they were, too, though not mine. Sometimes when we have to speak suddenly we come closer to the truth than when we have time to think. I said, “I suppose I write for children because I’m not bright enough to understand the difference between a children’s and an adults’ novel.”

  These words seem to me to contain considerable truth, as well as considerable naïveté. There’s something a little humiliating about having to accept that, at fifty-one, one is naïve. I am. I would, quite often, like to be grownup, wise, and sophisticated. But these gifts are not mine.

  I was comforted, two days after the panel, when I read an article on William James, written by a brilliant novelist and essayist, a writer of my own generation, a critic taken seriously by our contemporaries. In this essay it was evident that the author agreed with those who consider James naïve in his attitude towards religion and the supernatural; James’s hope for something beyond the abyss of nothingness after death is cited as evidence of his naïveté. With a shock of joy I realized in what good company I am: William James, pushing beyond the rational world to that wilder, freer place on the other side of the intellect. Gregory of Nyssa and his brilliant sister, Macrina, meeting at her deathbed and talking, unashamed and unafraid, of their love for their friends, for each other, and of the extraordinary vistas soon to open for Macrina. Socrates, drinking hemlock, and talking with calm certainty about what lies ahead for him. Many others, all more brilliant, more erudite, more sophisticated than I.

  And there are, too, the high-school students who come to me to talk about the transcendent, about God, about the hope for a meaning to all life, no matter how terrible and irrational it may sometimes seem.

  I look at many of the brilliant, sophisticated intellectuals of my generation, struggling through psychoanalysis, balancing sleeping pills with waking pills, teetering on the thin edge of despair, and think that perhaps they have not found the answer after all.

  Well, of course, neither have I. It is not up to me to do so. I am finite; in the earthly sense, mortal; with a good mind flawed by naïveté; dependent on my friends; on hope; on joy.

  16

  It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around, or discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it. If we are given minds we are required to use them, but not limit ourselves by them.

  It’s a strange thing that despite the anti-intellectualism in our country, we also set so much store by I Q’s and objective testing in our schools and colleges and businesses. Is passing a course in statistics really a legitimate requirement for a Ph.D.? Does the preliminary testing by which a child is placed in school really tell us enough about him? One of the teachers at O.S.U. brought this up. How do you teach, and show your concern for the student who isn’t very bright?

  An I Q cannot measure artistic ability. A potential Picasso may be a flop at objective vocabulary or number tests. An I Q does not measure a capacity for love. One of the most moving and perceptive sets of letters I’ve ever received came from a class of retarded children who had had A Wrinkle in Time read aloud to them. Their teacher apologized for their handwriting and mistakes in spelling and grammar; she needn’t have; she obviously loved them and had taught them to express love; maybe that’s more important than social studies. Maybe that’s what Yetta meant by giving the child a self.

  Children have helped to give me a self in their conversations with me and in their letters. There are always the letters which are no more than a class assignment: Write an author. But far more often there are letters remarkable for their depth of understanding, and which move me to the point of tears. And, lest I begin to take personal credit, there is a letter—one of my favorites—from a girl who really poured it on: “Dear Miss L’Engle, you are one of the greatest writers of all time,” and so on, fulsome phrase after fulsome phrase. She signed her name and then wrote, “P. S. I have not yet read any of your books, but I am sure they will be good when I do.” This helps give me a self, too!

  How do we teach a child—our own, or those in a classroom—to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have—or need—answers.

  Cynthia, one of our Crosswicks family this summer, is thirteen. She has wanted to be a nurse ever since she can remember, and she’ll make a very fine one. She was completely firm with the babies, and they adored her. When Thomas, the amber cat, had a bladder infection, Cynthia decided it would be good practice for her to give him his medication. It isn’t easy to give a large and stubborn cat unpleasant medication, but Cynthia managed, and with no help, either. We had been discussing, down by the brook, how nothing really important in life is in the realm of provable fact. Cynthia is pragmatic; she had her doubts.

  “What about love?” I asked her as we were crossing the big meadow on the way home. “Can you prove anything about love?”

  She held down an old strand of barbed wire for me. “I guess not.

  “What is love?”

  “A feeling.”


  “No,” I said, “a feeling is something love is not.” Cynthia didn’t like this; neither do I, lots of the time.

  “Why not?”

  I asked her, “You love your parents, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t there some days when all your feelings about them are bad? When you’re furious with them, and all you feel is anger, or that they’ve been unfair?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you still love them, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  We were silent for a while because we were picking daisies to make daisy wreaths for the babies. Cynthia was much more diligent about it than I was; I was thinking more about our conversation than about daisies, or even the babies.

  Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can’t be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved. Love is people, is a person. A friend of ours, Hugh Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books: “Love is not an emotion. It is a policy.” Those words have often helped me when all my feelings were unlovely. In a summer household as large as ours I often have to act on those words. I am slowly coming to understand with my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person.

  It also has a lot to do with compassion, and with creation.

  There are educationists (as jargon has it) who think that creativity itself can be taught, and who write learned, and frequently dull, treatises on methods of teaching it. It is rather as though they were trying to eat air, with the usual result. The creative impulse, like love, can be killed, but it cannot be taught. What a teacher or librarian or parent can do, in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I’m concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.