Re: [pf] Dose of Madeleine L'Engle [was A new list serve)

by Jill Taylor Bussiere

30 December 2000 18:29 UTC

Thanks Molly - These are keepers!
                    Jill

> A Dose of Madeleine L'Engle! These are all from her journals, not from
> her kids' books, but they parallel the same ideas found in Wrinkle in
> Time, Swiftly Tilting Planet, etc.
 
> "When I start a new seminar, I tell my students that I will undoubtedly
> contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance
> of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our
> minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot
> take us all the way." (A Circle of Quiet)
> 
> "We are a generation out of touch with reality. The 'realistic' novels
> push me further away from the truth of things, rather than bringing me
> closer. We cannot make mystery and miracle acceptable by trying to
> constrict them into the language of the laboratory or the television
> commercials." (Summer of the Great Grandmother)
> 
> "Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to be, or what
> television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought
> to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image,
> and further from reality." (A Circle of Quiet)
> 
> "To make community misunderstood is a powerful weapon of the Destroyer
> -- to promise permanence, to insist on perfection, to strangle freedom,
> so that instead of having community, we have a concentration camp." (The
> Irrational Season)
> 
> "'Daydreaming again, Madeleen? You'll never get anywhere that way.'
> "Where did Matron want me to go? Our civilization was rushing toward the
> devastation of the Second World War; the clouds were visible on the
> horizon...; and yet in school we were being taught to live in a climate
> where it was assumed that man is in control of the universe, and that he
> is capable of understanding and solving all problems by his own effort
> and virtue.
> "What I was doing...was instinctively rejecting this false illusion,
> refusing to think that our whole self is limited to that very small
> fragment of self which we can know, control, and manipulate; that very
> small fragment of self over which we have power." (Summer of the Great
> Grandmother)
> 
> "When we are /self/-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw
> ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of
> creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play,...then
> we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape
> our self-conscious selves." (A Circle of Quiet)
> 
> "It was not until I was nearly 40  that I discovered that higher math is
> easier than lower math....It was not until I discovered higher math that
> I understood 0x3=0. First of all, I had to accept that arithmatic is
> simply an agreed-upon fiction which makes life easier. Secondly, I
> realized that 0x3=0 is a philosophical rather than an arithmetical
> problem....; any kind of hate which would annihilate, any kind of lust
> for power which makes people expendable, is an example of three
> multiplied by zero equals zero." (The Irrational Season)
> 
> "My moments of being most complete, most integrated, have come either in
> complete solitude of when I am being part of a body made up of many
> people going in the same direction." (ibid)
> 
> -------
> 
> ~ Molly