A Circle of Quiet

by Madeleine L'engle

  I learned from Una, from Jock, from all of them. One of the best things about these kids is that they don’t worry about hurting any adult’s feelings when they talk about the world we’ve made for them to live in. We’ve made a mess of it, there’s no evading that. Nevertheless, no matter what we think of our educational system, more people today are literate than ever before. On the whole, even in desperate areas of poverty, most children have access to television sets, which—despite the mediocrity of many programs—give them a more sophisticated knowledge of what is going on in all corners of the world than any previous generation ever had. Because of our extraordinary technological advances in the last few decades, more opportunities are open to more young people than ever before.

  But talk with them. What have we educated them for? Have we given them too heavy a diet materially and neglected them spiritually? They have a sense of eschatology (another of those ology words: the word about the end of time, the word about the last things) that my generation, even growing up into the Second World War, didn’t experience. This spring our eleventh-grade son, calling home from boarding school, kept saying, “I don’t have time,” which is how many young people feel: if they aren’t killed in a war which they don’t understand, they’ll die of lung cancer from the polluted environment, or radiation effects from milk containing Strontium 90, or simply rainfall or snowfall.

  There was one snowfall at the Cathedral this winter which was a horrifying illustration of our ecology. I spend eight hours a day in the library of the Cathedral; I wandered in several years ago to write—there were too many disturbances at home—and became librarian by default. I have no qualifications, but I had no qualifications as choir director, either. And it is a perfect place for me, a big room full of books, including a splendid reference section; bay windows looking across the Close to the Cathedral itself; and an aura which says to me: Write.

  Una, when asked to describe the library, where we held our seminar sessions, wrote, “When I walk in here I feel I can be myself.” So do I. And it is run on the academic year, so I am free for our Crosswicks summers.

  Back to the snowfall and ecology: I am allowed to bring my dogs to work with me. They lie quietly on a blanket by my desk; they are obedient and know that they are not allowed to jump up when someone comes in; and most people love them almost as much as I do. Just outside the library is a large fenced-in stretch of greensward, known as the Canon’s Green, where all the Cathedral dogs romp. My dogs have many friends: Monarch, the bishop’s corgi; Cynthia’s two dachshunds; and Oliver and Tyrrell’s greatest friend is Fritz, Tallis’s Weimaraner, the size of a great Dane.

  On the afternoon after this particular snowfall, Fritz and Tyrrell had a glorious time romping, taking great bites of snow, throwing it at each other, rolling in it. Oliver, our ancient collie, now dead of dignified old age, was feeling much too arthritic to do anything but stand and watch tolerantly. Later in the afternoon Tyrrell vomited, and so did Fritz. Tallis called our veterinary friend, who said that it was the snow; he’d had any number of calls from people complaining that their dogs had been throwing up. I told my husband when I got home that evening, and he said, “Last night when I was in Riverside Park walking the dogs, the snow looked so pure and beautiful that I held up my face and opened my mouth to it. How horrible to think that we can’t do that any more.”

  Our children used to eat the snow when they were little, here at Crosswicks (maybe it’s still all right here); we made toffee in it. Is Josephine going to have to say to her babies, “Be careful not to get the snow in your mouth, it might kill you”?

  This sense of urgency has always been with my children, and those I work and talk with. They’ve grown up knowing that at any moment we could blow up our planet if some madman pushes the wrong button. During the Cuban crisis, when our youngest child was a second grader, we were listening to the news and when the weather report was announced he said, “Storms tomorrow. If there is a tomorrow.”

  Children, not without reason, blame the adults. But they want to talk about it with us, which is, in itself, an advance and a development. I know that I’m lucky when we talk, because the fact that they’ve read my books and responded to them means that walls between us are already down. During my happy day at Sidwell Friends School, several of the high-school students said to me, “We can’t talk to our parents because they don’t remember what it was like to be our age.”

  Memory is one of the most essential of the writer’s tools, and a writer finds it easy to have total recall, just as other people find it easy to balance a checkbook—something entirely beyond my capacity. But the adolescents today are concerned over a general lack of memory in their parents and teachers, and it is this forgetfulness of what it is like to be twelve, or seventeen, or twenty-one, that is largely responsible for the famous generation gap. The young look at the amnesiac over-thirties and say, “We look at the adults around us, and if this is what it means to be grownup, then we say, No! We don’t ever want to be like most of the adults we see.”

  So they dress as differently from us as they possibly can; they wear wild hairdos and symbolic jewelry; in a secular world they are crying out for transcendence; they try to get our attention in the most extreme ways; if we don’t listen, they throw a bomb.

  Una and I talked about this. She allied herself with the militants, and yet, with her open, loving face she talked to me about it. I Said one day, “I can see you getting frustrated enough to throw a bomb, Una, but I can’t see you throwing it in a building with anybody in it.” We both did a lot of thinking about how far frustration can legitimately push us.

  So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.

  I don’t go along with the people who say they’d never want to live their childhoods again; I treasure every bit of mine, all the pains as well as the joy of discovery. But I also love being a grownup. To be half a century plus is wonderfully exciting, because I haven’t lost any of my past, and am free to stand on the rock of all that the past has taught me as I look towards the future.

  The youngsters’ rejection of adults often shocks us so much that we in turn reject the rejection and are angered at the violent means by which they repudiate parents and teachers. They drop out of school and college because it just doesn’t seem worthwhile. Or they want a college degree without having to work for it. Or they have trial marriages, or just share a pad, rather than entering into relationships which are intended to last for life, often following the example of parents who have separated or divorced, with the concomitant philosophy that if you try marriage and it doesn’t work, you quit. They are rebelling not against our morality and discipline but against our lack of morality and our lack of discipline. They are unwilling to commit themselves with promises of fidelity in relationships because they have known too many grownups make these promises and then break them as though they didn’t matter. Somehow or other, promises, as well as adulthood, must be redeemed. My seminar students asked me, “But isn’t it better not to make the promises at all? Isn’t it more honest?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so. And I think I do have a right to talk to you about this, because I’ve been married to the same man for almost twenty-five years, and we love each other more now than we did twenty-five years ago. When we were married we made promises, and we took them seriously. No relationship between two people which is worth anything is static. If a man and wife tell me they’ve never had a quarrel, I suspect that something is festering under the skin. There’ve been a number of times in my marriage when—if I hadn’t made promises—I’d have quit. I’m sure this is equally true of Hugh; I’m not an easy person to live with.”

  I’m quite sure that Hugh and I would never have reached the relationship we have today if we hadn’t made promises.
Perhaps we made them youthfully, and blindly, not knowing all that was implied; but the very promises have been a saving grace.

  7

  It is generally accepted that youngsters, and not only those from the inner city but also those from the affluent suburbs and exurbs, are experimenting with sex and drugs, hard drugs. One bitter reason is that our country in general assumes that “the pursuit of happiness” really means “the pursuit of pleasure” and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good. For every discomfort there is a pill. Half the ads in our glossy magazines are for hard liquor: You’re depressed? Get sloshed; feel good. Drink this, eat that, swallow the other, and your sex appeal will rise. Stay young, don’t grow up, avoid contamination with death: have fun, fun, fun.

  If pleasure is the greatest good, then why not seek it in drugs?

  Another cause is the need of the human being for loyalty. Where home loyalties are lost, the drug subculture is an alternative. With the breakdown of close-knit family life, kids are desperately searching for new relationships. Small houses with no room for grandparents or stray aunts and uncles; fathers whose jobs keep them on the move—all this, as well as the shattering of families by divorce, has denied children the security of growing up in a close family unit, and they have to search desperately for another group to which they can be committed. There is no lack of commitment in the Black Panthers, or the Young Lords, or even Hell’s Angels.

  Then there’s the need for adventure; we’re not providing legitimate adventure for many of them: how many ghetto high-school kids can qualify for the Peace Corps or Vista? so they seek adventure illegitimately.

  8

  There have been a number of times during the past years when one of my “children” has come into the library, puttered around the bookshelves until we were alone and then sat by my desk to talk about love: should I sleep with him? does he love me? is this girl just having me on? what do you really think about marriage? every boy you go out with expects you to make out, all the way; the girls want anything they can get out of you, but I think this one is different; how do you know if you’re pregnant? my parents don’t like her, they think she’s a tramp, but she isn’t, and I love her.

  They really don’t want me to answer their questions, nor should I. If I have not already answered them ontologically, nothing I say is going to make any sense. Where I can be of use is in being willing to listen while they spread their problem out between us; they can then see it themselves in better perspective.

  But over the years two questions of mine have evolved which make sense to me.

  I ask the boy or girl how work is going: Are you functioning at a better level than usual? Do you find that you are getting more work done in less time? If you are, then I think that you can trust this love. If you find that you can’t work well, that you’re functioning under par, then I think something may be wrong.

  A lovely example of this is Josephine: the spring she and Alan were engaged, when she was eighteen and a sophomore at Smith, they found out that they could not possibly be apart more than two weeks at a time; either Alan would go up to Northampton, or Josephine would come down to New York. She knew that she would be getting married ten days after the close of college. And her grades went steadily up.

  The other question I ask my “children” is: what about your relations with the rest of the world? It’s all right in the very beginning for you to be the only two people in the world, but after that your ability to love should become greater and greater. If you find that you love lots more people than you ever did before, then I think that you can trust this love. If you find that you need to be exclusive, that you don’t like being around other people, then I think that something may be wrong.

  This doesn’t mean that two people who love each other don’t need time alone. Two people in the first glory of new love must have great waves of time in which to discover each other. But there is a kind of exclusiveness in some loves, a kind of inturning, which augurs trouble to come.

  Hugh was the wiser of the two of us when we were first married. I would have been perfectly content to go off to a desert isle with him. But he saw to it that our circle was kept wide until it became natural for me, too. There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.

  I have been wondering this summer why our love has seemed deeper, tenderer than ever before. It’s taken us twenty-five years, almost, but perhaps at last we are willing to let each other be; as we are; two diametrically opposite human beings in many ways, which has often led to storminess. But I think we are both learning not to chafe at the other’s particular isness. This is the best reason I can think of why ontology is my word for the summer.

  A Russian priest, Father Anthony, told me, “To say to anyone ‘I love you’ is tantamount to saying ‘You shall live forever.’”

  I am slowly beginning to learn something about immortality.

  Our children are hungry for words’ like Father Anthony’s. They have a passionate need for the dimension of transcendence, mysticism, way-outness. We’re not offering it to them legitimately. The tendency of the churches to be relevant and more-secular-than-thou does not answer our need for the transcendent. As George Tyrrell wrote about a hundred years ago, “If [man’s] craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural, be not fed on true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any superstition that is offered to it.”

  Hence the interest in mind-expanding drugs, in black magic, occultism, and a kind of superficial Buddhism or Hinduism, as though these totally demanding disciplines could be mastered overnight. And everybody, it seems, is looking to the stars, towards astrology and the occult in general. A friend and I recently had a talk which clarified a few things for me. He told me about going into a Doubleday bookstore and seeing, over the section marked RELIGION, a handwritten card: OCCULT. When he next went to that bookstore, RELIGION was gone: OCCULT was in.

  I started going on in high philosophical vein about what a snare and a delusion this is, and could see that he thought I wasn’t being very bright.

  Suddenly I said, “Hey, I think I know why astrology has such tremendous appeal. The year and month and day you are born matters. The very moment you are born matters. This gives people a sense of their own value as persons that the church hasn’t been giving them.”

  “Now,” he said, “you’re cooking with gas.”

  To matter in the scheme of the cosmos: this is better theology than all our sociology. It is, in fact, all that God has promised to us: that we matter. That he cares. As far as I know, no great prophet has promised people that God will give them social justice, though he may have threatened doom and extinction if the people themselves don’t do something about it. If God cares about us, we have to care about each other.

  Sociology is rational. God is not.

  God knows the very moment we are born.

  9

  We often respond to the rejection and contempt of youth towards parents by such thoughts as: Why would my child feel or act this way? I’ve always given him everything he wants. I’ve made do with less just so he could have a good allowance and all the clothes and cars he wants. I haven’t made harsh rules; he can stay out as late as he likes, and I never question who he’s with. And this is the thanks I get.

  Happily, more and more of us are coming to realize that such a parent is an ogre to the under-thirties. This kind of parent has given the child all the material goods of the world and not enough of the structured and disciplined love that would make the child truly free. Such a parent has earned, instead of the respect and admiration he was trying to buy, nothing but distrust and contempt. He is the “ugly adult” the child does not want to become.

  What about the mothers who loathe the thought of getting old, who think it a disgrace to look or act their age, as though becoming mature were something to be ashamed of instead of rejoiced in, mothers who pride themselves on dressing like their teenage
daughters, and consider it a compliment when people say they look like sisters. Perhaps the daughter doesn’t want a sister; perhaps she wants a mother. Here I am grateful for my resemblance to the giraffe—this is one temptation not available to me. On the rare occasions when someone, thinking to flatter and please, has made the “more like a sister than her mother” remark, my reaction has been rejection. I’d far rather be a reasonable-looking fifty-one than a raddled thirty.

  And what about the men who make a fetish of being hearty pals to their sons? What sixteen-year-old boy wants a forty-year-old man as a pal? I’m not talking about friendship; that’s something else again. Maybe he’d rather have a father instead, a father who, with love, says, You may go this far and no further, a father who makes rules and sets limits, who, when he says no, means no. Friendship, regardless of chronology, is based on mutual respect.