A Circle of Quiet

by Madeleine L'engle

  Half the congregation at the Cathedral on Sunday is under thirty; lots of them are long-haired and barefooted; lots of them aren’t Episcopalian or any other so-called Christian denomination. But they are looking for the rebirth of Christianity. So are the kids in communes, though many of them aren’t looking in the right places—but they are looking. Perhaps our age will not produce the great prophet, like Isaiah, that we seek; but I’m not at all sure that we haven’t already produced unrecognized prophets of considerable stature. Prophets are seldom popular in their own day. Perhaps the Christian world I look towards will not be called Christian; the powers of darkness may have succeeded in trampling on the Name so that we will not be able to recognize it again for a great many years. I think the name does matter, and I keep listening for it.

  There is a group of young ex-drug addicts in California called the Jesus Freaks. They have turned against drugs, and the transitory values of the world around them. I have met a group of Jesus Freaks in New York. They are, in an ancient, Pentecostal sense, trying to find truth, and what love really means. I’m not sure that they’re looking in the right direction—though they may be. The important thing is that groups of Jesus Freaks should exist in the nineteen-seventies at all. There weren’t any around in the sixties. Something extraordinary and new is emerging, and it gives me hope.

  12

  One spring one of my students showed me her notebook, in which she had written, “The only good artist is a dead one. All artists should be shot after they have finished producing. If they are allowed to live, they will start commenting on their works, and I have never heard an artist say anything intelligent about what he had done.… Beethoven had the right idea: he played one of his sonatas for someone, and when he had finished, the person said, ‘That’s very nice, but what does it mean?’ And Beethoven sat down and played the whole thing over.”

  She wasn’t being insulting; she was being accurate. I’m incapable of saying anything intelligent about anything I’ve written. When anybody asks “What are you writing about now?” if I try to reply, the book-in-the-works sounds so idiotic to me that I think, ‘Why am I trying to write that puerile junk?’ So now I give up; if I could talk about it, I wouldn’t have to write it.

  Dmitri Mitropoulos was asked if he could explain the extraordinary effect his conducting had on orchestra and audience alike, and he answered that he wouldn’t even try to explain it, for fear that he might become like the centipede who was asked by a humble little bug which of his hundred legs moved first when he walked. The centipede, responding to the admiration with immense pride, began to analyze the question, and has not walked since.

  Bug or centipede, we’re apt to get tangled up in legs when we begin to analyze the creative process: what is it? why do people write—or paint—or sing?

  If I grope for an answer, I glimpse it only in parable. There’s a story Quinn told me which says a lot to me:

  While he was at Yale Divinity School, he and all the young married students were given the opportunity of spending an informal evening with a well-known child psychologist. They were free to ask him anything they wanted to about children and family life, and one of the young mothers wanted to know why it is that everything in the household seems to fall apart around dinnertime.

  The doctor answered, “You yourselves know the obvious reasons: the children are tired; it’s the end of the day; they’re hungry; they’re ready for bed, so they respond by being whiny and fractious. You’re tired, too—you’ve been struggling with diapers and formulas and housework, and you’re apt to be edgy and short-tempered. Your husbands, coming home from their day’s work, are also tired and not at all interested in hearing about your domestic problems, and they respond to the five o’clock tensions by being irritable and often not as understanding as they might be otherwise. These are the obvious reasons and you all know them. The real reason—” and here he stopped and said—“you will probably want to contradict me—the real reason is that we are all afraid of the dark.”

  There was indeed a clamor of contradiction, and the doctor responded by saying, “The very violence of your reaction proves the truth of my words.”

  Not long after Quinn had left Yale and become minister of the Congregational church here in the village, he held a meeting for mothers of nursery-school-age children, and several of the mothers brought up a problem that had been bothering them: what do you do or say to your children when they’re afraid to go to bed in the dark?

  There was a long and troubled silence. Finally one of the mothers who was a little braver than the others stuck out her neck: “You give him a night light.”

  I’m afraid of the dark—not afraid to go up the stairs in the physical darkness of night, but afraid of the shadows of another kind of dark, the darkness of nothingness, of hate, of evil.

  So we rush around trying to light candles. Some are real: books are candles for me; so is music; so is friendship. Others blow up in our faces, like too much alcohol and too many sleeping pills or pep pills. Or hard drugs. Or sex where there isn’t any love.

  I think it was Toynbee who said that we are a sick society because we have refused to accept death and infinity. Our funeral practices open themselves up to satire, but they are only a symptom. There’s an insurance commercial on the radio which says, “If something should happen to you,” with the implication that without some unforeseen accident of course you’ll never die. I am acutely uncomfortable when people talk about “passing away” because they’re afraid to say “die.” When I die I will die; I won’t pass away, or pass on, or pass out. I will die.

  Small children do not yet have a sense of chronology and therefore live in eternity; they are far more willing to accept death than we are. When his dearly loved grandfather died, our young son shut up like a clam. It seemed to his older sisters that he didn’t care. We said, Wait. That night during his prayers he reached the point in his “God bless” prayer when it was time to name his grandfather, and stopped. He started over, came to the same point, and stopped again. Started once more, and finally said, “And God, please take care of Grandfather wherever you want him to be, another star or wherever you think, and make him be all right, and we love him. Amen.”

  I think I was even more relieved than the girls that he had not been indifferent, or shoving death away, but had been thinking, accepting.

  Red, a seventeen-year-old boy who lived in our building in New York, often dropped into our apartment shortly before dinner. He was an only child, and our normal noisiness appealed to him. And he liked to wander into Hugh’s and my room, where I had my desk, and talk. One evening he came in as I was, as usual, banging away on the typewriter. “Madeleine, are you afraid of death?”

  I turned around. “Of course, Red.”

  “Thank God. Nobody’s ever admitted it to me before.”

  I’ve had people tell me they aren’t afraid of death. I don’t think I believe them any more than I believe writers who tell me they don’t care what anybody thinks of their work. My agnostic faith does not, at its worst, include pie in the sky. If it runs along the same lines as does William James’s, it cannot evade acceptance of responsibility, judgment, and change. Whatever death involves, it will be different, a venture into the unknown, and we are all afraid of the dark. At least I am—a fear made bearable by faith and joy.

  The same spring that Red asked me that question, Hugh was on tour with a play, and Bion, with a high, undiagnosed fever, had to go to the hospital. Various loving (though misguided) friends, knowing that he missed the animals at home, brought him two goldfish and two turtles. He had been home from the hospital only a few days when both goldfish were found floating on top of the water. Being of a scientifically skeptical turn of mind, he refused to accept our verdict and insisted on waiting for the doctor’s afternoon visit. The doctor’s properly certified pronouncement of death was accepted, and we then had an elegant burial at sea, all of us walking the length of the hall singing a lugubrious hymn and then so
lemnly flushing the goldfish down the toilet. Amen.

  The turtles grew and flourished. I tended them while the children were at camp. When we spent a few weeks here at Crosswicks the change of water didn’t agree with the turtles, so I took a bucket and went a mile to a spring-fed pond, and the turtles survived. But the following spring James, the younger of the two, began to suffer from soft-shell. Bion got advice from the neighboring pet shop and gave both James and Elroy, the elder turtle, baths Sin a special anti-soft-shell solution. In spite of this, one day when he came home from school we had to tell him that James was dead. Now, a turtle can be a very important thing to a small boy. He had kissed James and Elroy when he went off to camp (have you ever tried kissing a turtle?) and greeted them joyfully on his return. And even if, because of school and his roller-skate ice-hockey team, he sometimes forgot to change their water or to feed them, they mattered to him. James’s death was a real blow. He went into his room and flung himself on his bed and sobbed. By dinnertime he had recovered and was quite philosophical and cheerful. “I think it did me good to cry. I got it off my head.”

  But when it came to disposing of the remains he was quite definite. James could not have a burial at sea like the goldfish, who had been members of the family for so short a time, and who were, after all, fish. James, he announced, had to be taken up to Crosswicks come summer, and be buried in the apple orchard “where he belongs.”

  “But,” we protested, “we aren’t going to the country for weeks. We can’t just keep James till then. He’ll smell.”

  Bion was calm but definite. “Then we’ll have to preserve him. The animals in Jo’s biology set are in preservative.”

  Well, I ended up freezing James. I wrapped him in aluminum foil, put him in an envelope, sealed it, marked it James, and put it in the refrigerator. Every time I defrosted, there was James, and usually at dinner someone would crack, “Turtle soup tonight, Mother?” But we did take James up to Crosswicks and bury him in the orchard, ringing a dinner bell to give the procedure proper dignity.

  Our old collie, Oliver, died this past winter. It had always been understood that when Oliver died he would be buried in the Canon’s Yard at the Cathedral, near his old friend, Tempête, Tallis’s English setter. But Oliver died in midwinter when the ground had been frozen solid for weeks. There was no possible chance that a grave could be dug for him. I asked the veterinary who had given him his final shot what was the usual procedure, and he began going on about dog cemeteries and cremation urns. I was still standing in the office with the old dog lying on the table. I had stayed with him, my hand on him, while the shot took effect, and this had surprised the vet: “Most people don’t want to see it. They’re afraid.” And then he started talking to me about the sickening sentimentality of dog cemeteries. I said, “Oliver needed me while he was dying. He doesn’t need me now. I’m not sentimental about his body. What is the simplest thing?” “The city will pick him up and cremate him and dispose of the ashes.” “All right. Please have that done.” It cost ten dollars, I think. It was all quite simple and, under the circumstances, right and proper.

  But I found, later on when I got around to feeling, that I did mind, I minded badly, that Oliver wasn’t buried in the Canon’s Yard with Tempête.

  I am neither logical nor theological about this. I don’t have the word about it at all.

  I am afraid of the dark.

  And if I ask about this fear, do not offer me pie in the sky or talk to me in the narrow world of logical proof. Answer me, please, with the St. Matthew Passion; with Twelfth Night; with Guernica; with simile and metaphor, image and icon. There isn’t any other way to express or to understand anything which transcends material facts.

  13

  In these strange and difficult years since man has learned to split, though not to fathom the dark and dangerous heart of the atom, the attitude towards the language of myth has altered radically. It is the scientists themselves who have shaken our faith in their omnipotence, by their open admission that they have rediscovered how little they know, how few answers they really have.

  Before they discovered nuclear fission and fusion, before they discovered the terrible fallibility this power revealed to them, many scientists were atheists; we don’t need God if everything is explainable—in which case we would not need the language of the imagination and there would be no poets or storytellers. But on that day in 1945 in the desert in New Mexico when a group of men exploded the first atomic bomb, on that day when a light brighter than a thousand suns touched the sands of Alamogordo and those who had made it happen watched the mushroom cloud that has hovered over us ever since, this attitude changed. It is the scientists themselves who today are telling us that they cannot tell us everything—even as we walk on the surface of the moon, even as we probe into the strange and further field of genetics. The deepest scientific truths cannot be expressed directly. We hear this from men like Pollard, who has remained a distinguished scientist and has also become a priest. Fred Hoyle is a famous astrophysicist; but when he has an idea that goes beyond present knowledge (something very different from wisdom) or that might upset some tired old pragmatic scientist, he turns to writing fantasy, where he can communicate ideas that are too big, too violent, too brilliant to be rendered directly.

  The myths of man have always made it clear that it is impossible for us to look at the flame of reality directly and survive. Semele insisted on seeing her lover in his own form, as god, and was struck dead. In the Old Testament it is explicitly stated, many times, that man cannot look on the living God and live. How, then, do “myths” become part of experience?

  In my church we observe, with considerable discipline, the season known as Lent. After its austerities, the brilliance of Easter will shine with greater joy. In the Jewish religion candles are lit, one each night for seven nights, for Hanukkah. The Hindus celebrate Dewali, the festival of lights, in which every house is ablaze with lights to rejoice in the victory of good over evil. In every culture there is a symbolic festival of light conquering darkness.

  If we are not going to deny our children the darker side of life, we owe it to them to show them that there is also this wild brilliance, this light of the sun: although we cannot look at it directly, it is nevertheless by the light of the sun that we see. If we are to turn towards the sunlight, we must also turn away from the cult of the common man and return to the uncommon man, to the hero. We all need heroes, and here again we can learn from the child’s acceptance of the fact that he needs someone beyond himself to look up to.

  I feel about the cult of the common man somewhat as I do about restricted vocabulary and rapid reading. The common man lives within his capacity; he is probable as well as common; because of this he will choose the safe way. But mankind has progressed only when an uncommon man has done the improbable, and often the impossible, has had the courage to go into the darkness, and has been willing, out of the nettle, danger, to pluck the flower, safety.

  Physiologically our backbones are not made for standing upright—one reason we human beings have so much back trouble. We have the backbones of four-footed animals, and had our ancestors limited themselves to their capacity, we would still be down on all fours, and therefore incapable of picking up a flower, a strange stone, a book, and holding it in front of our eyes.

  But somewhere, sometime back in the far reaches of history, some uncommon man did the improbable, burst beyond the bounds of his capacity, and stood up on his hind legs so that his front paws were freed to hold something up to be looked at. And the road of evolution changed.

  The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.

  But this is the Age, among other things, of the Anti-hero. This is the Age of Do-it-yourself; Do-it-yourself Oil Paintings: Just Follow the Numbers; Do-it-yourse
lf Home Organ Lessons; Do-it-yourself Instant Culture.

  But I can’t do it myself. I need a hero. Sometimes I have chosen pretty shoddy ones, as I have chosen faulty mirrors in which to see myself. But a hero I must have. A hero shows me what fallible man, despite and even with his faults, can do: I cannot do it myself; and yet I can do anything: not as much of a paradox as it might seem.

  In looking towards a hero, we are less restricted and curtailed in our own lives. A hero provides us with a point of reference.

  Charlotte Napier, in The Love Letters, tries to explain this to Joāo Ferreira: “Supposing you were sitting in a train standing still in a great railroad station. And supposing the train on the track next to yours began to move. It would seem to you that it was your train that was moving, and in the opposite direction. The only way you could tell about yourself, which way you were going, or even if you were going anywhere at all, would be to find a point of reference, something standing still, perhaps a person on the next platform; and in relation to this person you could judge your own direction and motion. The person standing still on the platform wouldn’t be telling you where you were going or what was happening, but without him you wouldn’t know. You don’t need to yell out the train window and ask directions. All you need to do is see your point of reference.”