A Circle of Quiet

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  I am naïve again, perhaps, in thinking that the love and laughter of Crosswicks is, in its own way, the kind of responsibility Mann was talking about. I do not think that it is naïve to think that it is the tiny, particular acts of love and joy which are going to swing the balance, rather than general, impersonal charities. These acts are spontaneous, unself-conscious, realized only late if at all. They may be as quiet as pulling a blanket up over a sleeping baby. Or as noisy as the night of trumpets and stars.

  One Saturday this summer was the occasion of the annual Firemen’s Rally. They came down the lane in their red fire trucks, around our corner and down the lane to the fairgrounds; they came from four states, and seven counties in Connecticut, and Great-grandmother had a splendid time sitting out on the lawn watching them. In the evening after the rally there was a carnival, and Dana and Margie, two of our summer “children,” went with Hugh, coming home with enormous trumpets, like the ones used to announce the arrival of kings in color movie spectaculars—except that these are plastic. But they make a glorious wild bray which sounds like the trumpeting of an elephant. Sunday evening was clear and luminous so we went to the star-watching rock and welcomed the arrival of each star with a blast of trumpet. We lay there, in an odd assortment of coats; I had on an embroidered coat a friend had bought in Dubrovnik; the two girls had on ancient fur coats; and we were covered with blankets. We needed them, even though the rock itself still held the warmth of the sun, our own star, and radiated a gentle heat to us as we lay there and watched the sky, blowing the trumpets and sharing a can of insect repellent and listening to the crickets and the katydids and trying to identify the other night singers, and then outsinging them with all the nursery rhymes and songs and hymns we could think of which had stars and alleluias in them.

  And I was totally back in joy. I didn’t realize I had been out of it, caught in small problems and disappointments and frustrations, until it came surging back. It was as radiant as the rock, and I lay there, listening to the girls trumpeting, and occasionally being handed one of the trumpets so that I could make a loud blast myself, and I half expected to hear a herd of elephants come thundering across the far pastures in answer to our call.

  And joy is always a promise.

  THREE

  1

  One day this past spring a young man who works part-time for the Cathedral came into the library to let off steam. He is not a Christian, and he hates the church in any structured form—what is sometimes called the Establishment. (I war against the Establishment, too, but I want it to be there for me to hit at.) He began judgmentally denouncing all the clergy for being hypocrites.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Just what do you mean by hypocrite?”

  They did not, it seemed, live up to his standard for clergymen. I was willing to concede that not only was this undoubtedly true but they probably didn’t live up to their own standards for clergymen, either. Trying not to be equally judgmental, because everything I said to him hit my own weaknesses, I said, “You talk a lot about your integrity, but you go on working here, taking every advantage the Cathedral gives you, and disapproving vocally of everything it stands for. How do you manage that? How close is the ‘you’ of your ideals to the ‘you’ of reality? When I react the way you’ve just been doing about someone else’s behavior, it usually stops me short if I remember how far my actual self is from the self I would like to be.”

  One of the reasons this young man and I are friends is not so much that he is willing to stand there and let me pontificate but that he understands what I’m getting at. “You mean,” he said slowly, “that what I’m really doing, underneath, is talking about myself?”

  “Yes, but not only you. All of us. We all do it.”

  The most “whole” people I know are those in whom the gap between the “ontological” self and the daily self is the smallest. The Latin integer means untouched; intact. In mathematics, an integer is a whole number. The people I know who are intact don’t have to worry about their integrity; they are incapable of doing anything which would break it.

  It’s a sad commentary on our world that “integrity” has slowly been coming to mean self-centeredness. Most people who worry about their integrity are thinking about it in terms of themselves. It’s a great excuse for not doing something you really don’t want to do, or are afraid to do: “I can’t do that and keep my integrity.” Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.

  The gap between our “real” and “actual” selves is, to some degree, in all of us; no one is completely whole. It’s part of what makes us human beings instead of gods. It’s part of our heritage from our mythical forebears, from Adam and Eve. When we refuse to face this gap in ourselves, we widen it.

  It is only a sacramental view of life which helps me to understand and bear this gap; it is only my “icons,” which, lovingly and laughingly, point it out to me: not only the Buddha; throughout the years others have come to help me.

  People like Una, as well as Buddhas, can be icons for me. Una feels, with justification, that she has been betrayed by the Establishment. One of these betrayals came when she went to church and was made to feel unwelcome because she was black. Una is for revolution. And so, I discover, am I.

  What is the Establishment? What is revolution?

  They are not incompatible. Each is essential to the life of the other. If they are to live at all, they must live symbiotically, each taking nourishment from the other, each giving nourishment in return. The Establishment is not, thank God, the Pentagon, or corruption in the White House or governors’ palaces or small-town halls. It is not church buildings of any denomination. It is not organized groups, political parties, hierarchies, synods, councils, or whatever. It is simply the company of people who acknowledge that we cannot live in isolation, or by our own virtue, but need community and mystery, expressed in the small family, and then the larger families of village, church, city, country, globe.

  Because we are human, these communities tend to become rigid. They stop evolving, revolving, which is essential to their life, as is the revolution of the earth about the sun essential to the life of our planet, our full family and basic establishment. Hence, we must constantly be in a state of revolution, or we die. But revolution does not mean that the earth flings away from the sun into structureless chaos. As I understand the beauty of the earth’s dance around the sun, so also do I understand the constant revolution of the community of the Son.

  But we forget, and our revolutions run down and die, like a record on an old, windup phonograph.

  My own forgetfulness, the gap between the real, revolutionary me and the less alive creature who pulls me back, is usually only too apparent. But my husband and I have been encouraged by the fact that we ourselves have learned something about love and honor and loyalty as we have tried to teach these values to our children. And I have learned from the very stories I write. This is a humbling process, but also a joyful one.

  So my hope, each day as I grow older, is that this will never be simply chronological aging—which is a nuisance and frequently a bore—the old ‘bod’ at over half a century has had hard use; it won’t take what it did a few years ago—but that I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously—to be, in fact, a true adult.

  To be.

  2

  The focus of our days is the dinner table, whether, as often happens in the winter nowadays, it is just Hugh and me or I am cooking for a dozen or more. When the children were in school I didn’t care what time we ate dinner as long as we ate it together. If Hugh were going to be late, then we would all be late. If he had to be at the theatre early, we would ea
t early. This was the time the community (except for the very small babies) gathered together, when I saw most clearly illustrated the beautiful principle of unity in diversity: we were one, but we were certainly diverse, a living example of the fact that like and equal are not the same thing.

  While Alan was teaching and finishing his master’s degree, he ate a good many meals with us, for he often had to be in our neighborhood. Somehow it often happens at our table that we get into great and lovely battles (Alan and I seldom fight; when we do we are like two five-year-olds, and neither of us can bear it until we have made up). My usual battles with him are lovely because we are basically on the same side; they are nevertheless battles. Sometimes my husband acts as devil’s advocate; he’s very good at it. Sometimes the adversary is the darkness that roams the earth. During one dinner, Alan mentioned the men who feel that it is not God who is dead, as some theologians were then saying, but language that is dead. If language is to be revived or, like the phoenix, born of its own ashes, then violence must be done to it.

  This seemed to me to be a distinct threat. If language is dead, so is my profession. How can one write books in a dead language? And what did he mean by “doing violence to language”? I began to argue heatedly, and in the midst of my own argument I began to see that doing violence to language means precisely the opposite of what I thought it meant. To do violence to language, in the sense in which he used the phrase, is not to use long words, or strange orders of words, or even to do anything unusual at all with the words in which we attempt to communicate. It means really speaking to each other, destroying platitudes and jargon and all the safe cushions of small talk with which we insulate ourselves; not being afraid to talk about the things we don’t talk about, the ultimate things that really matter. It means turning again to the words that affirm meaning, reason, unity, that teach responsible rather than selfish love. And sometimes, doing violence to language means not using it at all, not being afraid of being silent together, of being silent alone. Then, through the thunderous silence, we may be able to hear a still, small voice, and words will be born anew.

  Tallis says that the greatest music ever written is the silence between the Crucifixus and the Resurrexus est in Bach’s Mass in B minor. Yes; and I would add that some of the greatest writing mankind has ever produced comes in the caesura; the pause between words.

  Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethans used “um” and “er” the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: “You know.” We interject “you know” meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence.

  If I look to myself I find, as usual, contradiction. Ever since I’ve had a record player I’ve written to music—not all music, mostly Bach and Mozart and Scarlatti and people like that—but music: sound.

  Yet when I went on my first retreat I slipped into silence as though into the cool waters of the sea. I felt totally, completely, easily at home in silence.

  With the people I love most I can sit in silence indefinitely.

  We need both for our full development; the joy of the sense of sound; and the equally great joy of its absence.

  3

  Our youngest child, when he first became conscious of vocabulary, often did violence to words in absurd little ways which delighted us. Hugh and I listened seriously, lest we make him self-conscious, or think we were laughing at him. We needn’t have worried; he plunged into vocabulary like a sea gull into water, entirely fascinated with whatever he came up with. Even the laughter of his elder siblings did not deter him, and he is now happily malaproping in Latin, French, and German. One day, aged seven, he came home from school highly indignant because the boys’ gym period had been curtailed. “We only had ten minutes of gym,” he said, “and that was all anesthetics.”

  This was not just something to laugh at; it sent me back to my own, dreaded gym periods where anesthetics rather than calisthenics would have been more than welcome. Any team I was on lost automatically; when teams were chosen, mine was the last name to be reluctantly called out, and the team which had the bad luck to get me let out uninhibited groans. I now have this emotion at my fingertips if I need it for a story I’m writing; or if I need it to comfort some child who is going through a similar experience. It does us good to listen to things differently.

  I remember “anesthetics” not only because it reminded me of my own pains over gym but because this small, delectable laugh came while I was in the middle of a very bad period, literarily speaking, and needed any reason for laughter, no matter how trivial. A Wrinkle in Time was on its long search for a publisher. Finally one, who had kept the manuscript for three months, turned it down on the Monday before Christmas. I remember sitting on the foot of our bed, tying up Christmas presents, and feeling cold and numb: anesthetized. I was congratulating myself on being controlled and grownup, and found out only later that I’d made a mess of the Christmas presents; I’d sent some heady perfume to a confirmed bachelor, and a sober necktie to a sixteen-year-old girl. So I called Theron, my agent: “Send the manuscript back to me. Nobody’s ever going to take it, it’s too peculiar, and it just isn’t fair to the family.” He didn’t want to send it back, but I was cold and stubborn, and finally he gave in.

  My mother was with us for the holidays, and shortly after Christmas I had a small party for her with some of her old friends. One of them, Hester Stover, more than ever dear to me now, said, “Madeleine, you must meet my friend, John Farrar.” I made some kind of disgruntled noise, because I never wanted to see another publisher; I was back to thinking I ought to learn to bake cherry pie. But Hester, going to a good deal of trouble, insisted on setting up an appointment, and I took the subway down to John Farrar’s office. I just happened to have that rather bulky manuscript under my arm.

  He couldn’t have been kinder or warmer. He knew some of my other work and was generous enough to say that he liked it, and he asked me what I was up to now. I explained that I had a book that I kind of liked, but nobody else did, or if they did, they were afraid of it.

  I left it with him. Within two weeks I was having lunch with him and Hal Vursell, and signing a contract. “But don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t do well,” they told me. “We’re publishing it because we love it.”

  It is a right and proper Cinderella story. And I’m sure Cinderella appreciated her ball gown more because she’d been forced to sit by the ashes in rags for a long time before her fairy godmother arrived. There’s another moral to the fairy tale, too: the golden coach can very easily turn back into a pumpkin.

  And here’s where I must stretch the image a little further: glass slippers went with the ball gown and the golden coach, and glass slippers are fragile things. If one’s feet grow too big, the slippers break; if one stamps around instead of dancing in them, they shatter.

  Both children and adults ask me: “What did you do when you heard that A Wrinkle in Time had won the Newbery Medal?”

  It’s an easy question to answer, because it’s a moment I couldn’t possibly forget. It was in the morning, just as I was hurrying the children off to school. My husband, who was in a play on Broadway, was asleep, and if there’s an unbreakable rule in our household, it is that we do not wake Daddy up in the morning, and we don’t speak to him until after he’s had two cups of coffee, read the paper, and done his crossword puzzle.

  The telephone rang. It was long distance, and an impossible connection. I couldn’t hear anything. The operator told me to hang up and she’d try again. The long-distance phone ringing unexpectedly always makes me nervous: is something
wrong with one of the grandparents? The phone rang again, and still the connection was full of static and roaring, so the operator told me to hang up and she’d try once more. This time I could barely hear a voice: “This is Ruth Gagliardo, of the Newbery-Caldecott committee.” There was a pause, and she asked, “Can you hear me?” “Yes, I can hear you.” Then she told me that Wrinkle had won the medal. My response was an inarticulate squawk; Ruth told me later that it was a special pleasure to her to have me that excited.

  We hung up, and I flew through the dining room and the living room like a winged giraffe, burst open the bedroom door, flew in, gave a great leap, and landed on the bed on top of my startled husband.

  Joy!

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux have now published ten of my books, and I hope we will be bedfellows forever. They are generous with me in all kinds of ways, and I appreciate especially that they will let me try many different forms of writing. One of the reasons I went unhappily from publishing house to publishing house before F S & G took me on was that I would write a book, it would have a moderate success, and then the publisher would want me to do another book like it: you’ve done it in pink, dear, now do it in blue. But I’d write something quite different, and there I was, out in the cold again. My friends at Farrar, Straus and Giroux allow me to experiment, which is the only way a writer grows.

  After the unexpected success of Wrinkle I was invited to quite a lot of literary bashes, and frequently was approached by publishers who had rejected Wrinkle. “I wish you had sent the book to us.” I usually could respond, “But I did.” One publisher absolutely refused to believe that his house had rejected the book, and I had to go to my journal and show him the page where I had recorded my misery on the day that his house had said no. “But I never saw it,” he cried. “It never got to me.”