The Wisdom of Madeleine L'Engle, Part 2
Love is not just an emotion. It is a policy.
Zhang Guo and his Magical Gourd, From: Album of Kano School Paintings Kano Tsunenobu, Japanese (Kyoto 1636 - 1713), painting, album leaf Date c. 1683
In A Circle of Quiet, L’Engle explained that she wrote A Wrinkle in Time to explore and affirm the existence of love. But the process wasn’t so straightforward. It happened in a time of transition. “We’d sold the store, were leaving the safe, small world of [Crosswicks] and going back to the city and theatre” she writes in her memoir.
When they first met, L’Engle’s husband Hugh was a stage actor in New York. He left his successful career so they could move to the New England village of Crosswicks to raise their new family. They bought a general store which, at the time, was losing business, and the couple transformed it into a lucrative venture. When the business reached a point of peak success and the only way up was to expand, they decided it was time to sell and return to their passions. It had been a decade of quiet family life.
First, the family took a long, cross-country trip (twice over, to the west and back to New York) and on the trip L’Engle recalled:
“we drove through a world of deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me. And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs. Whatsit. Mrs. Who. Mrs. Which. I turned to the children and said, ‘Hey, kids, listen to these three great names that just popped into my mind; I’ll have to write a book about them.”
She’d been reading Einstein and Eddington, and other books on cosmology, explaining that these books “satiated [her] longing for God better than books of theology.” A Wrinkle in Time is an affirmation of her own belief system, that love is a policy, a system of faith, and it need not be proven by fact.
Obviously we should believe in facts (and most especially science), but that doesn’t mean that we also shouldn’t believe in ourselves, especially when it comes to making art.
When I think of L’Engle writing this novel—her debut— at forty, I think about her mounting rejections (those no’s, those hard facts) and how the faith she put in herself kept her going.
L’Engle let's her protagonist Meg Murray, whose father has gone missing, explain this paradox by putting her middle school principal in his place:
Mr. Jenkins, you’ve met my mother, haven’t you? You can’t accuse her of not facing facts, can you? She’s a scientist. She has doctors’ degrees in both biology and bacteriology. Her business is facts. When she tells me that my father isn’t coming home, I’ll believe it. As long as she says father is coming home, I’ll believe that.
L’Engle wrote A Wrinkle in Time in her journal, admittedly between frustrated scribblings about rejection. To believe that those scribblings were meant to become a novel was an act of faith, a commitment to loving herself. A policy, not just a fact.
Here is my takeaway from Madeleine L’Engle this week: doing something that matters in a season of obstacles is how you love yourself.