A Circle of Quiet

by Madeleine L'engle

  Madison Avenue, my old bugaboo, is one of the greatest of all limiters. The more vocabulary is limited, the less people will be able to think for themselves, the more they can be manipulated, and the more of the product they will buy: selling the product is Madison Avenue’s end; limiting the public’s capacity to think for itself is its means.

  “What Madison Avenue wants to do,” I said to the students at O.S.U., deliberately using a violent word for shock value, “is screw the public.”

  In my excitement—I feel very strongly about this—I used the phrase several times. I found out later at dinner with several of the students and an elderly professor that he was the only one who had even noticed the phrase. He mentioned it at dinner, wondering why I had used it, and the others looked completely baffled.

  I explained that I had used it deliberately, because I wanted to emphasize what I was saying, and therefore wanted to use a word which would have shock value. But, except to a man who had passed his seventieth birthday, it hadn’t.

  Alas. What have we done to our good, bawdy, Anglo-Saxon four-letter words? We have not done violence to them; we have done the opposite. We have blunted them so with overuse that they no longer have any real meaning for us.

  “Screw the public,” said I, at half a century plus one, and the students, all younger, took it for granted. It had no more impact than if I had said, “Madison Avenue is trying to do the public.”

  When will we be able to redeem our shock words? They have been turned to marshmallows. They need violence done to them again; they need to be wrested from banality; saved for the crucial moment. We no longer have anything to cry in time of crisis.

  “Help!” we bleat. And no one hears us. “Help” is another of those four-letter words that don’t mean anything any more.

  7

  It’s another of those odd contradictions: we combine controlled vocabulary with totally uncontrolled vocabulary and end up with our language impoverished. It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God’s name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don’t believe in him. Yet their speech and/or writing is liberally sprinkled with “God” and “Jesus” and “Chrissakes.” But if I pause and think, it’s quite apparent that there’s a reason for that …

  Another contemporary contradiction is that more books are being published today than ever before but educated people are reading less. Over a decade ago I was sent a questionnaire from college; the questionnaire, when collated, would give some idea of what we had done and become since graduation. One of the questions was, “How many books have you read in the past year?”

  Most of the girls with whom I went to college were moderately privileged intellectually. Smith has never been an easy college to get into. I felt very ashamed when I answered that particular question, “Two or three books a week.”

  When the questionnaire was collated there was horror at the answer to that particular question: a high percentage had read no books at all.

  All right: our children were little; this is not an age of many servants; most of us had a good deal to struggle with. But no books? I read while I’m stirring the white sauce, while I’m in the subway, in the bath.

  I don’t believe it’s coincidence that there was at this same time a great deal of emphasis on controlling not only vocabulary but the content of the books children were to read: no reference to death, to evil, to sex. Not only were new books which mentioned these taboos not being published, but children were no longer given many of the books I grew up on, myths and fairy tales and nursery rhymes. But I have never forgotten the things I learned from Mother Goose, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm, some of whose stories are admittedly pretty grim.

  Consider the grimness of these stories. I read them unexpurgated. My children have my old copy. Some of the stories deal quite openly with evil and sin and death, and the suffering of the innocent while the wicked flourish. The princess doesn’t always get the prince. The clever, wicked fellow often triumphs over innocent virtue. Is it or isn’t it a good idea to let our children read this kind of story?

  I’m like most mothers; my immediate instinct is protective. I tend to be very much a mother lion when it comes to my cubs. But then I remember the eagles, who also love their fledglings. In their great, beautiful nests, protected from all danger by their tremendous height, where no marauder can menace the little ones, the mother and father eagle have carefully woven thorns. These thorns are sharply turned inwards so that the fledglings won’t be too comfortable.

  My husband and I have tried never to make the nest too cozy. And we certainly did not limit our children’s reading—or did we? In that paradoxical sense, I suppose yes, we did. My husband, after a hard day’s work, enjoys sitting down and relaxing over a Martini before dinner; this is good, this quiet hour of talk and laughter. But we didn’t ask our small children to come and share Martinis with us. There is a proper time and a proper place. It’s the same with books. We didn’t read Faulkner’s Sanctuary aloud at their bedtime. Nevertheless, we were aware that we had to try to prepare them for the rough world outside the nest. Hans Christian Andersen lets the little match girl die. The Red Queen is pretty rough with Alice, and Lewis Carroll makes no bones about the fact that the sweet little oysters end up by getting eaten. In my mother’s old Victorian children’s novels, death was often an integral part of the story.

  It has been said, and truly said, that reading the Grimms, that weeping for the death of the Selfish Giant, that having witches be bad, and trolls ferocious, leaves its mark on the children. So it does.

  When I was little a group of older children terrorized me with games of witches taken from fairy tales. It may—or may not—be because of this that I take the current interest in witchcraft seriously; I do not take evil lightly, or think that it’s unimportant and can be coped with easily.

  An example of the permanent effect of a book is that of Charlotte’s Web on our elder daughter. She read it, aged eight, and when she had finished she was in a mood all day, very close to tears because of Charlotte’s death at the end. I tried to explain to her that according to the spider calendar Charlotte had lived to be a very old lady, and had had a fine life, lived as long as any spider does, and longer than many. But that only partially comforted her. Then we came to Wilbur the pig.

  “Mother,” she said, “why did Mr. Zuckerman want to kill Wilbur?”

  “Well, Mr. Zuckerman was a farmer, and farmers do kill pigs and sell them for meat.”

  “Have we ever eaten pig?”

  “Yes. Often.”

  “When?”

  “Well, whenever we have ham, that’s pig. Or bacon. Or pork chops. Or sausage.”

  “I hate sausage!”

  Sausage had always been one of her favorite dishes. But to this day she does not care for pig. She denies that Wilbur had anything to do with this, but she has little to say when I inform her that the entire conversation above is reproduced, verbatim, from my journal.

  Wilbur the pig left his mark, whether she remembers it or not. But has it blighted her life? I doubt it. She is a beautiful and fulfilled young woman, doing precisely what she ought to be doing. I am convinced that all the Wilbur the pigs of her life have helped prepare her to be the mature human being which she is; I have a vast amount to learn from the maturity of my first-born child.

  There are many ways of thinking about how much we should, or should not, protect our children from the rough facts of life. It’s said that the greatest single thing the Greeks contributed to civilization was giving us: “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.” So what I am saying, no matter how categorically I state it, is simply “on the one hand,” and a very fallible hand it is. The older I grow, the more grateful I am for the fact that there is far less overprotection of our children, at least in the book world, than there was a decade ago, even while I quite openly admit that Wilbur the pig, evil witches, ravenous foxes, do leave their marks on children.

  But
do we want unmarked children? Are they to go out into the adult world all bland and similar and unscarred? Is wrapping in cotton wool, literary or otherwise, the kind of guidance we owe them?

  My mother lived a wild kind of life in her day. She may be a grande dame now, but in her youth she rode camels across the desert, watched ancient religious rituals from a Moslem harem, was chased by bandits down the Yangtze River. During one time of crisis, her best friend, who grew up as unscarred as it is possible to grow, came to offer help and sympathy, and instead burst into tears, crying, “I envy you! I envy you! You’ve had a terrible life, but you’ve lived!”

  Once more: I don’t mean that we should turn our children out of the nest at the age of two to earn their own livings; no preschool gin or Lady Chatterley’s Lover; we do need a sense of timing; and where we seem to have been off in one direction a year ago, now we’re overbalancing in the other direction. Alan showed me the outline for the Religious Knowledge course for the tenth grade at one of the more famous boys’ schools in New England. The general title was: The Problem of God, from Aristotle to Sartre.

  Sorry, whoever you are who went to great pains to make this outline, but I think this is sheer madness. Even a postgraduate student working for an advanced degree in theology could hardly cover the Problem of God from Aristotle to Sartre in a semester. This kind of thing is more than likely to dispose of God forever as far as a tenth grader is concerned.

  I feel the same way about schools which proudly announce that they are giving inexperienced students in one year the Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, the plays of Shakespeare, and the Victorian novel and the Russian novel and contemporary French literature and.… The result is that the kids often don’t read the books at the right time because they think they’ve already read them. We do owe our children intelligent guidance, mitigated by a sense of humor. There’s a great deal of difference between guidance and censorship, though there’s a thin line of demarcation and we can’t always keep to it. We’re going to fall off the knife’s edge, one way or another. The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves. Sometimes we can fool adults about what we are; it’s not so easy with children; they’re going to see through us, no matter how elaborate our defenses. But this is one reason they’re so exciting to work with; their vision is still clear.

  Phillips Brooks said that “preaching is truth mediated by personality.” Surely one can substitute teaching for preaching. It’s what makes teaching and preaching and writing an activity of a human being instead of a machine.

  One morning in Ohio someone brought up the separation of church and state, and the fact that hymns and prayers are now forbidden in public schools, and I agreed with those who felt that any kind of religious proselytizing in a public school is an impertinence—an independent school, obviously, is another question.

  “But,” I found myself saying, “you will find that you cannot help teaching children your own religion, whatever it is. If you are an atheist, that will be clear to them, even if you think you’re teaching nothing but social studies. If a belief in God motivates your life, the children are going to know that, too, whether you ever mention God or not. If you are more interested in money than anything else, that’s not going to escape them. You’ve got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children. Subjects can probably be better taught by machines than by you. But if we teach our children only by machines, what will we get? Little machines. They need you, you as persons.” And I quoted Emerson: “What you are speaks so loudly over your head that I cannot hear what you say.”

  So I know, with a sense of responsibility that hits me with a cold fist in the pit of my stomach, that what I am is going to make more difference to my own children and those I talk to and teach than anything I tell them.

  Perhaps the fact that I do not remember the teacher who accused me of copying that poem tells something about her: I do not remember her name; I do not remember what she looked like, the color of her hair or eyes, her age, or the kind of clothes she wore. I remember exactly what Miss Clapp looked like, her hair style, makeup, little idiosyncrasies of dress and manner which were wonderfully dear to me. But that other teacher: nothing. When she decided that I was neither bright nor attractive nor worth her attention, she excluded me, and this is the most terrible thing one human being can do to another. She ended up annihilating herself.

  To annihilate. That is murder.

  We kill each other in small ways all the time.

  At O.S.U. we discussed dividing grades into sections according to so-called ability. Every teacher there was against it. Every teacher there believed that a student in the lowest group is rendered incapable of achieving simply by being placed in that group. “So I’m in the dumb group. That’s what they think of me. There’s no use trying, because they know I can’t do it.”

  Murder.

  I didn’t try to learn anything for the annihilating teacher for just these reasons.

  I worry about this. I worry about it in myself. When I am angry or hurt, do I tend to try to exclude the person who has hurt me?

  I said that a photograph could not be an icon. In one strange, austere way there are photographs of two people in my prayer book which are icons for me. I keep them there for that precise reason. They are people I would rather forget. They have brought into my life such bitterness and pain that my instinct is to wipe them out of my memory and my life.

  And that is murder.

  I had, through some miracle, already managed to understand this, when I came across these words of George MacDonald’s:

  It may be infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.

  Thank you, Grandfather George.

  He has come to my rescue many times, has said to me just what I needed to have said in a moment of doubt or confusion. When I was a little girl my grandfather used to send me books from London each Christmas. The first thing I did was smell them, open them, stick my nose in them, because English printer’s ink smells quite different from American: smell, and then read. I loved the English Children’s Annuals with their mixture of story, information, and comic strips; I loved Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales; and I loved George MacDonald, beginning with The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. Like all great fantasists, he has taught me about life, life in eternity rather than chronology, life in that time in which we are real.

  And he has finally made me understand what lack of forgiveness means. I cannot stay angry; this is not a virtue in me; I am physically incapable of going to bed out of sorts with anybody. But, although I have not stayed mad, have I excluded? put from my mind the person who has upset me? It is this which is the act of unforgiving.

  I will remember this, I hope, each day when I come upon those two photographs of two very separate and different people. So, yes: those images have moved from image to icon. They have within them more than they are in themselves; in them I glimpse, for at least a fragment of a second, the forgiveness of God.

  The Greeks, as usual, had a word for the forgiving kind of love which never excludes. They call it agapé. There are many definitions of agapé, but the best I know is in one of Edward Nason West’s books: agapé means “a profound concern for the welfare of another without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process.”

  Not easy. But if we can follow it, it will mean that we will never exclude. Not the old, the ill, the dying. Not the people who have hurt us, who have done us wrong. Or the people to whom we have done wrong. Or our children.

  I wrote out this definition of agapé on the blackboard at O.S.U. I have written it on other blackboards, quoted it in lectures. It teaches me not only about forgiveness but about how to hope to give guidance without
manipulation.

  8

  A play like The Skin of Our Teeth, a book like Charlotte’s Web or Alice in Wonderland are not defined at either end by an age limit. A book that is only for grownups, or only for six-year-olds, or adolescents, may serve a purpose, but it is a limited purpose, and is usually bounded by its place in time and culture. The most exciting books break out of this confinement and can be read at any period in time, in any country in the world, and by a reader of any age. One Crosswicks summer our sixteen-year-old alternated happily between Anna Karenina and C. S. Lewis’s Narnia allegories. Our fourteen-year-old read H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Louisa May Alcott. Our eleven-year-old read farm journals, and Captain Mayne Reid’s travel adventures, books which had belonged to his great-grandfather.

  I think that was the summer I was writing The Moon by Night, a story that, as far as travel line goes, is based on the ten-week camping trip our own family took. I read the children the first draft, and they said, “No, Mother, you’ve stuck too close to your journals. It isn’t real yet.” They were right. I threw it all out, started again, and let it become considerably more real.

  I think this has something to do with violence to words in the sense that Alan was talking about it. The first draft was nothing but an image, a mirror vision, with no reality of its own. Out of the image the writer tries to wrest reality. Perhaps the writer must, like Alice, go through the mirror into the country on the other side.