A Circle of Quiet

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Miss Clapp for me was a point of reference, not nearly as much because of what she taught me directly as because of what she was.

  All teachers must face the fact that they are potential points of reference. The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the courage to be; if we are, we make mistakes; we say too much where we should have said nothing; we do not speak where a word might have made all the difference. If we are, we will make terrible errors. But we still have to have the courage to struggle on, trusting in our own points of reference to show us the way.

  I once gave an assignment to a very assorted group of eleventh and twelfth graders to write a character study of someone they truly admired. They had been coming up with a strong crop of villains, and I pointed out that it’s lots easier to write a villain than an admirable character, and I wanted them to try a positive, rather than a negative, character study. It didn’t have to be anyone living; it could be someone from any time in history who was, to them, truly admirable; or it could be someone from fiction, a novel or a play or an epic poem; or it could be someone completely imaginary, their own ideal of what an admirable person ought to be. It was one of the least structured assignments I’d given them.

  One of the boys, black and brilliant, had already admitted to me during a conference that his first reaction to almost any situation was resentment. It was obvious that his own feelings of hate and anger were disturbing to him—this was before militancy was as general and as accepted as it is today—and that he wanted to get rid of them. He was very open in discussing his problems but, even while he was asking for help, he was pessimistic about solutions. When he handed in this particular paper he had done part of a character study of someone who, I felt, turned out to be quite unadmirable. At the bottom he had written, “I’m terribly sorry about this paper. I really tried, but I can’t do it. I can’t think of anybody I admire.”

  The other kids made suggestions: John F. Kennedy; Abraham Lincoln; Martin Luther King; Marie Curie; Cesar Chavez. He listened politely but not one name drew a real spark from him.

  No wonder he is unhappy and confused! To be sixteen years old and have nobody to admire means to have no point of reference. I know that he was then and undoubtedly is still running into situations where a reaction of resentment is almost inevitable. And what can one do to help? In terms of action, not very much. All I knew to do was to care about him, and to show him that I cared. When I walk through the streets of the Upper West Side of New York, my own little gestures of love in this angry world seem sadly inadequate. But they are all I have to give, and I am just falling prey to thinking that I can—or ought—to do it myself, if I underestimate them.

  St. John said, “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it, and cannot extinguish it (I need the double meaning here of the word comprehend). This is the great cry of affirmation that is heard over and over again in our imaginative literature, in all art. It is a light to lighten our darkness, to guide us, and we do not need to know, in the realm of provable fact, exactly where it is going to take us.

  FOUR

  1

  Alexander Schmemann, the Russian Orthodox theologian, says that Pope John XXIII’s greatness lay in his not being afraid to open himself up to ideas that could not be contained in neat parcels, in not having to see the end of a road in order to have the courage to take the first steps.

  We tend, today, to want to have a road map of exactly where we are going. We want to know whether or not we have succeeded in everything we do. It’s all right to want to know—we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t—but we also have to understand that a lot of the time we aren’t going to know.

  The young people I talk with are, themselves, taking the first steps on a road leading into the unknown. They are at that most difficult of beginnings, the beginning of their adult selves. Their increasing consciousness of this may be responsible for the fact that some of them refuse the challenge to step boldly out into the dark. Being somewhat (somewhat! I can hear my husband say) of an extremist myself, I tend to have more sympathy with complete opting out than with the search for security and fringe benefits. I have more hope that someone who has shouted, “Stop the world, I want to get off!” can get back on and enjoy the ride, than someone who wants more cushions. My sympathy is automatically with the rebellious student rather than with the authorities. I was told that I was denied Phi Beta Kappa on behavior. Certainly I fought, with a small group of other rebels, for all kinds of academic reform. The year after I graduated there was an article in The New York Times listing all the reforms we had fought for and crediting them to the member of the administration who had tried hardest to block our way. This struck me as wildly comic, though during the battles themselves I had failed to find this person amusing.

  But because I have a violent temper, because I know just how devastating the results of my own violence can be when it is uncontrolled, I knew, even back in my schooldays, that trying to fight for right by violence wasn’t right—for me. Is there a time when one has to fight with violence? My mind and emotions do not agree here. I still think violence should be the last possible weapon, used only when everything else has been tried. And even then … I don’t know. Could Hitler have been stopped except by out-and-out war? I don’t think so. On the other hand, it was Gandhi who toppled the British Empire, not the militants …

  I listen to the news and hear of war and rumor of war, of crime and wanton destruction and loss of humanity, and think of Ionesco’s brilliant play, Rhinoceros. It starts out in a small French village on a Sunday morning; everything is normal and ordinary; the people in the village are very much like the people we know, like us. Then a rhinoceros strolls through the village square, and this first rhinoceros is like a presage of plague, because the people of the village start, one by one, turning into rhinos; they are willing to give up being their particular selves, to give up being human beings, to become beasts. And one of the characters says, “Oh, why couldn’t all this happen in some other country so we could just read about it in the papers?”

  But it’s happening here. There are rhinos wandering about our land, and it is the younger generation which is most apt to see them. No, that’s too easy, that’s not fair; we must not make any kind of chronological segregation here, any more than in old people’s homes. It’s not a matter of chronology. I am afraid of people of any age who are willing to be involved in distant generalities but shy away from particularities; and I suspect that most writers, artists, share my feelings, because we deal in particulars.

  In Two Cheers for Democracy E. M. Forster says, “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

  This is a statement no good Communist should accept; a Communist will—or should—betray any friend, parent, child, for the party. When we choose a generality, an idea, a cause, instead of a person, when this becomes the accepted, the required thing to do, then it doesn’t matter if villages are destroyed by bombs; traffic deaths become statistics; starving babies can be forgotten when the television is turned off; and there will no longer be anybody who will read or write a poem or a story, who will look at or paint a picture, who will listen to or compose a symphony. No young man will walk whistling up the street. No young girl will sing about the love in her heart.

  2

  Children can teach us by their instinctive particularity. They learn through the particulars of their senses, and I learn from them. My children see to it, for instance, that I am kept au courant with their music, and I like it, not because it is sometimes noisy and meaningless, but because it is trying to express in today’s medium the hope that there is, somewhere, somehow, structure and meaning in the world.

  “Listen to the words, Mother,” they tell me. “Maybe you won’t go for the music, but you’ll like the words.”

  Th
ey are words which on first hearing may make little sense, but they are words which are trying to break through the restrictions of our blunted vocabulary. “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me,” the song says. And another: “If you let me make love to you, then why won’t you let me touch you?” The need for love, for community, for being together, for being, for isness, sounds loud and clear in these songs. There is a passion for peace, a hatred of violence, a trying to break through to the place where two people can reach out and hold one another.

  Dangerous, I suppose. No wonder people left the Congregational church when the kids played their own music, sang their own words.

  Our youngest child is perhaps more determined than the others that I like the music. On the other hand, not long ago, when he and his best friend came out to the Tower to see me, he asked what I was playing on the phonograph. “Couperin.” “Cool. Can we borrow it?”

  When Bion was in first grade, Hugh and I went to New York for three days to celebrate our anniversary. When we returned, the first-grade teacher came into the store and told Hugh that while we were away our son had seemed perfectly happy; there was no noticeable difference in his behavior. However, the children in first grade did a lot of painting, and Bion, while we were away, painted only in black. The day we returned there was again no noticeable difference in his behavior, but his paintings were a violent joyfulness of color.

  It certainly gave us pause.

  Painting, writing, acting, are for him, as for his parents, a sign of order and meaning in the universe, and in today’s strange world. Whether we like this world or not, whether we consider it progress or not, whether we think it one of the most exciting and challenging times in the history of mankind or not, it is here. This is a fact we cannot change by any form of escapism, nihilism, secularity, or do-it-yourself-ism.

  My mother has seen the advent of gas light to replace oil lamps, of electric light to replace gas. She has seen the advent of the telephone, wireless, cables, television, all our means of instant communication. She has seen the development of bicycles, automobiles, prop planes, jet planes, rockets to the moon. And she has seen the explosion not only of technology but of population; there are more people alive now on this planet than have died in all the time since the world began.

  Can we produce a single human being like Leonardo, who could reach out into every area of the world of his day? Our children have never known a world without machines: dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, electric beaters, blenders, furnaces, electric pumps, saws, computers—there are more machines than we can possibly count; beware, beware, lest they take us over.

  We can’t absorb it all. We know too much, too quickly, and one of the worst effects of this avalanche of technology is the loss of compassion.

  Newsprint is too small for me now; I listen to the news on WQXR. I find that I always listen carefully to the weather: this affects me. If there is some kind of strike going on in New York—there usually is—which will inconvenience me, I get highly indignant. I am apt to pay less attention when the daily figures for deaths on battlefields are given; it is too far away; I cannot cope emotionally. Occasionally it hits me hard when I hear the announcer say that there were only fifty-four deaths this week: only? what about the mothers, wives, sweethearts, children, of the fifty-four men who were killed? But it has to happen close at home before I can truly feel compassion.

  We are lost unless we can recover compassion, without which we will never understand charity. We must find, once more, community, a sense of family, of belonging to each other. No wonder our kids are struggling to start communes. No wonder they will follow insane leaders who pull them into a morass of dope or murder. If they have no heroes, if we don’t provide guidance, they are open to manipulation.

  Marshall McLuhan speaks of the earth as being a global village, and it is, but we have lost the sense of family which is an essential part of a village. During our Crosswicks years we had the reality of this belonging, despite divisions between old and new residents; if tragedy struck anybody in the village, everybody knew it, and everybody suffered with those who suffered: old and new, Republican and Democrat, Catholic and Protestant. Because the store was at the crossroads, across from church and firehouse and filling station, Hugh and I always knew what was going on.

  “They say there was a first-grade kid hit by a car. Who was it, Madeleine?”

  I knew, because someone had come, white-faced, into the store, saying, “I was on my way up from Clovenford, and there was this little kid lying all bloody on the road; she belongs to those new people who just moved into the old Williamson house.” The little girl was in the same room in school with one of our children; I knew what she looked like; she was not just any child, but one, particular, little girl. I felt in body and bone, heart and spirit, the pain her mother must be feeling. I continued with my work, trying to pray on that deep, underneath level. And the whole village responded, as it always does in emergency. The husband was out of town; there were offers by other husbands to get in touch with him; the nearest neighbors wanted to spend the night with the mother so she wouldn’t be alone; food, quantities of food, as always, was brought in. This was a tragedy with a happy ending; there was loss of blood but no vital injury. The child was back in school in a few weeks. But we cared. It was close enough to all of us so that we were able to have compassion in a way that most of us cannot for the babies dying of starvation, or earthquake, or war, all over the globe.

  Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general.

  3

  One hot afternoon the fire siren rang and Quinn went with the firemen to the top of a steep hill where a car was burning; the flames were completely out of control, and inside the inferno was an entire family, a mother, father, and four children.

  At his seminary, Quinn had been taught that God, being perfect, is impassible and cannot suffer. That evening he stormed, “If God didn’t care, then I don’t want him.”

  I cried out, “Of course he cared! He was there in that burning car. If he wasn’t, then he isn’t God.”

  General compassion is useless. An aloof, general god is useless. Unless we, too, are in that burning car, we are useless.

  It is still taught in some seminaries that it is a heresy to think that God can suffer with us. But what does the incarnation show us but the ultimate act of particularity? This is what compassion is all about.

  4

  It’s no coincidence that just at this point in our insight into our mysteriousness as human beings struggling towards compassion, we are also moving into an awakened interest in the language of myth and fairy tale. The language of logical argument, of proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith. For me this involves trust not in “the gods” but in God. But if the word God has understandably become offensive to many, then the language of poetry and story involves faith in the unknown potential in the human being, faith in courage and honor and nobility, faith in love, our love of each other, and our dependence on each other. And it involves for me a constantly renewed awareness of the fact that if I am a human being who writes, and who sends my stories out into the world for people to read, then I must have the courage to make a commitment to the unknown and unknowable (in the sense of intellectual proof), the world of love and particularity which gives light to the darkness.

  I’m a bit worried about the present fashionableness of myth, about all the books and articles and definitions, about the fact that myth has suddenly become meaningful and relevant (“Come, ranks of devils, assemble, I have a new battlefield for you: myth: Infiltrate!”). The current brouhaha about myth is blunting our awareness of it, as our vocabulary has been blunted. But that doesn’t make it any less a vehicle of truth. Overexposure may make us see, even mor
e than usual, through a glass, darkly; but the violent truth of myth is still there for us. I begin to understand why parables are sometimes used to conceal truth; it is another of those illuminating paradoxes.

  My white china Buddha can conceal as well as reveal truth; but somewhere in the maze in which I wander, the dead ends of selfishness, silliness, sadness, I am guided, and I do not need to know precisely how. We are finite human beings, with finite minds; the intellect, no matter how brilliant, is limited; we must go beyond it in our search for truth.

  An atheistic professor at one of the great universities—Harvard, I think—told his students, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” He also told them that he couldn’t remember the source of this particular quotation, but no matter, it was terribly important.

  Yes. But it isn’t just enough to know the truth ourselves: it is not a secret to be hoarded. How do we dare hope to share it without blundering too deeply into falsehood?

  One day we were sitting around the kitchen table drinking tea, and my husband and our ten-year-old son got into a heated argument about baseball. Bion said, “But, Daddy, you just don’t understand.” Hugh replied in his reasonable way, “It’s not that I don’t understand. I just don’t agree with you.” To which our son returned, “If you don’t agree with me you don’t understand.”

  Most of us feel this way. If you don’t agree with me you don’t understand. But it takes a child to admit it. Today there is much loose talk about communication and about truth, and little understanding of what either one of them is. The language, which is ontological rather than intellectual, has little to do with the “linguistic sciences,” which tend to smother language, rather than doing Alan’s kind of violence to it. The linguistic sciences’ emphasis on simplifying communication produces the odd result of so complicating it that we evade it entirely. Communication is never easy, as we discovered at Babel.