Almost anybody who loves books has at least one author, sometimes a half-dozen or so, whose imagery or philosophy or characters or stylings take up residence deep within the reader's being, who become more than just favorite writers but rather contributors to the way he or she sees and/or lives life. Sometimes you'll really be lucky, and a couple of these folks will still be alive.
This year I've lost two of them so far, with the deaths of Kurt Vonnegut and now Madeleine L'Engle. (At least Ray Bradbury is still with us.) Heh, I look back on some short stories I wrote in high school, or at least my recollections of them (the hard copy is long vanished), and plenty of them could have won, placed or shown in a Bad Vonnegut contest should such a thing exist.
I discovered L'Engle as a child, as most people do, when I read A Wrinkle in Time. So much of it resonated: Meg Murry's dissatisfaction with herself and profound sense of being misunderstood. Mrs. Whatsit, whose eccentric persona masked a much deeper reality. The loving beings who had no conception of the visual world. The concept of a numbing, malevolent, dehumanizing darkness sweeping over reality, claiming the universe -- but combatted through the ages by poets, saints, scientists, artists, philosophers and, chiefly, Jesus. And then there's IT. I've read some King and some Lovecraft, and I've seen a horror film or two, and I know from suspense -- but perhaps the scariest imagery I can think of is the scene where Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin encounter the suburban street in which children are bouncing balls in complete synchronization ... and witness a family's terror when one of them misses a bounce. (It's been a while, I might have some details wrong here, but that's the way I remember it.) That book and its many sequels are labeled children's literature, but in my mind, it's just plain literature. While L'Engle did love writing for children, she didn't much care for being referred to or marketed as a children's author, as she felt it implied that one writes differently for kids than adults, that one doesn't take them quite as seriously. She never, never talked down to children in her writing; rather, her writing jumpstarted the brain, made one think and want to think.
In recent years, I've picked up L'Engle's Crosswicks Journal memoirs, in which she explores her family, writing and faith spheres of life. Paricularly notable is The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, in which the central aspect is her caring for her dying mother who suffered from dementia. While some in her family have challenged the complete accuracy of L'Engle's memoir writing -- and while she occasionally mingled fact and fiction in both her novels and nonfiction writing (sometimes openly: in one of the Crosswicks books she told a lengthy story from her days running a general store with her husband, then at the end of it noted that the story was fictional but the truths conveyed weren't) -- it still strikes me as some of the best narrative-reflective-selfexploration journal writing I've seen. I appreciated her as a woman of deep (specifically, Christian) faith who acknowledged deep doubts; who saw something almost sacramental in the little things and tasks of life, like cooking a meal or making music.
L'Engle invested her life in battling IT in all ITs guises. The best tribute one can give the lady is to do the same.
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hazmatplaytime's post on her primary blog, Playtime at Hazmat. But I've run across a sentence that's far too amazing not to share with the world at large:
