Anne Corwin on Madeleine L'Engle

I can't tell you how many times I've found myself in the home of a close friend or even just an acquaintance who strikes a chord with me and discovered dog-eared copies of novels by Madeleine L'Engle on their bookshelves or piled in a corner, retained years after their initial reading, obviously still being pulled out and read in the tub or under a tree on blank unscheduled days that afford a return to the lovely lazy rhythms of childhood. Finding the books, fond delighted conversations often follow, stories of lonely adolescent frustration broken by a shard-sharp pang of recognition between these pages, a sense of a world that might actually recognize and repay deeper attentions. I can't say I was surprised to discover that Anne Corwin, a colleague of mine at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies who writes quite a lot of interesting stuff about neurodiversity issues and prosthetic self-determination, was a Madeleine L'Engle fan. Upon discovering it, I found myself thinking, as I usually do, Ah! I knew there was something about her that seemed kin…

I've been meaning to call my readers' attention to Corwin's lovely extended tribute to Madaleine L'Engle's famous trilogy, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wing in the Door, & A Swiftly Tilting Planet, written in the aftermath of the author's death in September.

Corwin briefly addresses the ill-considered protestations of those among her technocentric likely readership who might be inclined to dismiss L'Engle's works because of her professed Christianity (similar arguments apply to C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, among many others) or the fact that she is classified as a children's writer (similar arguments apply to J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, among many others):

L'Engle identified as Christian, however, she was most assuredly not a fundamentalist, and noted that fundamentalists tended to dislike and fear her works because they saw spirituality as a "closed system", whereas she saw it as an "open system…"

In many respects, L'Engle's themes are actually highly subversive and even transgressive to the point where I would challenge any fellow atheist to read Wrinkle and its sequels and come away with nothing of value. Any author that managed to publish a book in 1962 wherein the protagonist was simultaneously a girl and good at math (and in which said protagonist's mother was a double PhD in biology who spent more time staring into an electron microscope than dutifully tidying up) is obviously no "Focus on the Family" sycophant. I think it would be just as much of a shame to pigeonhole L'Engle's writing into being "for Christians" as it would be to pigeonhole it into being "for children…"

Then Corwin goes on to discuss some of L'Engle's crucial themes (my quotations are much abbreviated, again, I recommend that folks read her post in its entirety):

L'Engle aptly demonstrates in Wrinkle that evil is not necessarily the sort of thing one can identify by looking for stereotypes of mindless malice, but the sort of thing that can come about when people oversimplify reality to such a degree that their efficiency drive becomes destructive. Ethical negligence can be just as terrible in its effect as a deliberate breaching of ethics. And when malice does emerge, it can be the effect of (rather than the root cause of) the power imbalances that ensue from this negligence….

In Wind, the echthroi are portrayed as the perpetrators of a phenomenon called "Xing", which is basically the active negation of someone else's personhood. Humans, other sentient creatures, and echthroi alike can X others… The echthroi (and the "Xing" concept) are frightening on that visceral level that anyone who has ever faced a bully will surely recognize. The negating impulse inherent in bullying is shown to be the very same brand of evil that results in people being burned as witches, or deemed "inconvenient" (e.g., because they stand in the way of someone's ambition for the throne), or tossed aside as insignificant or useless due to some perceived imperfection.

The concept of good as expressed in Wrinkle, Wind, and Planet is a very active one -- good is not a passive quality, or simply a feeling, but something people do. In many respects, this characterization of good is practically synonymous with love. Not love in the sense of infatuation or even romance, but rather, in the sense of actively respecting someone's personhood and helping them to find their own way of seeing joy in existence…. Often, love involves learning things you'd rather not learn, and in risking losing your sense of comfort in the world for the sake of knowing what is actually true….

Corwin's tribute becomes most moving when she goes on to apply these themes to her own work and writing:

I see the sum total of conscious minds in the universe as a sort of network through which information is processed into joy and beauty and art and music and mathematics (and all those other delightful forms into which we can now channel the energies evolution has serendipitously gifted us with). And the more different kinds of minds there are, the more the totality of sentience gets to experience of what there is to experience….

When Meg Murry learns to appreciate herself for who she is rather than pining to be someone else, this does not mean that she stagnates… Regardless of how someone gets to be the way they are -- whether they are born that way, or whether they become that way as a result of experience or development, or whether they choose to alter themselves over the course of their life -- they still exist in a particular form at every point. And there is a kind of art and skill to being able to know the ins and outs of one's form deeply. L'Engle's characters' journeys often involve coming to this level of self-awareness…

In Planet, the nuclear threat that drives the plot is representative of that basic, chill despair that sets in when a person decides that nothing means anything and that it therefore doesn't matter if it all goes away.

With that in mind, part of what I aim to do when I write -- whether it be about life extension, or neurological variation, or any of the other topics I cover fairly regularly -- is to get the message across that the universe is simply teeming with meaning and opportunities to experience joy.