Last night, I finished this wonderful book by Madeline L'Engle. I had seen it here and there for many, many years, but after much encouragement from the Head of the Great Books Department of the Dark House (Melissa), I picked it up. It was a very good read, but what caught me off guard was that this is a children's book, but contained many high level thinking items in it. If and when Mel and I have kids, I will look forward to sharing books like this with them. I wish I would have read it as a child. Age steals things from us before we notice that we have lost them and then it is too late to regain them. I feel that becoming involved in a book like this is one of the precious items that has been stolen from me. We forget the complexity and beauty of what it was like to read as a child; to believe and imagine that the pages you are holding and turning are actually occuring and you are not a bystander, but have been given a place of honor and are an acting participant within the story. I still try to read like this, but it it is job and I have to concentrate heavily to come close to achieving it, but I remember as a boy many fond memories of feeling like I completely disappeared within the pages and was into the story so much that I would laugh out loud, cry, have my heart beat wildly, or go to sleep worried because I was afraid of what might be lurking in the next chapter. I miss being able to read and participate like that.
The simple plot is good versus evil and good wins because of love, but to dumb the book down to that does it no justice. Mrs. L'Engle has written a masterpiece of children's literature and was honored with the prestigious Newberry Award in 1963. The book is based heavily on the idea of "tessering", which is the idea that time and space are not linear, but are more like a piece of bread or a sponge in the fact that they are porous and are highly capable of expanding and contracting. I was highly impressed with L'Engle's ability to weave such heavy material among a children's story that also contained many lighter elements that are expected in a children's book. I was also impressed/caugh off-guard by the overtly Christian passages in this book. There are many times when L'Engle uses not paraphrases of Scripture, but actual verses to move the dialogue along or the story itself. I did not expect this to occur because it won a Newberry Award. They read it in many different arenas. I bought my copy at Target. I have heard and read many secular accounts of the greatness of this book. I am glad to see a Christian author not only being overtly Christian, but also being of such grand excellence that the world sees this and awards it. I feel this is a grand lesson each of us could learn from. I was taught long ago by a minister of mine that Christians should be the best at everything so that we have the ability and stage to reflect that excellence back to its only source: God. Thus, bringing all the glory due to Him back to Him because this minister would often say it was our only task. A very high order and one that I feel L'Engle achieves.
I enjoyed the story and the book is a part of a quintet series and I will be reading the other four over time. However, my favorite part of the book was that it included her acceptance speech for her Newberry Award. I was struck by several phases because I have been thinking about them myself and haven't been able to put them into words, but L'Engle is a master author and is capable of doing so. The speech was worth the $7 alone that I paid for the book. The first phrase has to do with why we should be reading/writing and making our children read and it goes as follows:
"....We (writers) have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher's (the creator of the Newberry Award) excitement of leading young people into an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity..."
And the second phrase is this:
"...In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth....The extraodinary, the marvelous thing about Genesis is not how scientific it is, but how amazingly accurate it is. How could the ancient Israelites have known the exact order of an evolution that wasn't to be formulated for thousands of years. Here is a truth that cuts across barriers of time and space..."
Hope you enjoyed the post. Sorry, it was long. I feel it is leading to another post or maybe several. Sorry. Mel could have warned you if she had only known. She does this for me. She is my interpretor.
Hope you are having a good Wednesday,
David
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