An Acceptable Time

There are invisible strings, hundreds and thousands of them, that run back deep into our childhoods - Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory," if you will - and often you don't know that one exists until something happens to pluck it. Madeleine L'Engle is dead, at eighty-eight: I never got very deep into anything she wrote except the Time trilogy and its companion volume, Many Waters, but those books I probably read six times each at least, and the string her death plucked has been vibrating in my mind all day - for Charles Wallace and Meg Murray and Calvin O'Keefe and Mrs. Whatsit, but also for the child I was when I encountered her books, the near-yet-faraway past in which I read and then re-read them. For John Podhoretz, whose building she lived in when he was a boy, the chord is thicker, the note stronger. If you loved her books, go read his tribute.

Comments

Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time caught the imagination and spirit of many of us young readers, mainly in hindsight due to its fusion of science and transcendence. The book has sold over six-million copies. John Podhoretz was a lucky guy to live near her.

Her following remark to Robert Abernethy in a 2000 interview is interesting:

Religion and science? One and the same. I don't have any trouble with it. A lot of people do. They have to put one here and one there. And I think they're much more like that, each one informing the other.

Madeleine Engle, Requiscat in Pace

Posted by Peter Leavitt | September 8, 2007 2:12 PM

It wasn't until much later that I learned that echthroi was good Greek, and a tesseract was a real concept, and there really are mitochondria.

Posted by Christopher M | September 8, 2007 6:12 PM