Tribute

Madeline L'Engle died last week; she was 88 years old. As a young reader, I devoured everything by L'Engle on the library juvenile/young adult fiction shelves. And then later, as an adult, I discovered her non-fiction works, and read them with equal voracity. I appreciated her candid honesty and vulnerability; her ability to write out her questions and search for answers in personal struggles with faith, and life and death. Perhaps a scene from Meet the Austins explains her journey, when Grandfather explained to Suzy, "The search for knowledge and truth can be the most exciting thing there is as long as it takes you toward God instead of away from Him."

There was very little "childish" about L'Engle's children's literature. In her Newberry Award acceptance speech, in 1963, she said,

"What a child doesn’t realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairly tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture. Many Newbery books are from this realm, beginning with Dr. Dolittle; books on Hindu myth, Chinese folklore, the life of Buddha, tales of American Indians, books that lead our children beyond all boundaries and into the one language of all mankind.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth… The extraordinary, the marvelous thing about Genesis is not how unscientific 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.

But almost all of the best children’s books do this, not only an Alice in Wonderland, a Wind in the Willow, a Princess and the Goblin. Even the most straightforward tales say far more than they seem to mean on the surface. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn --- how much more there is in them than we realize at a first reading. They partake of the universal language, and this is why we turn to them again and again when we are children, and still again when we have grown up.

Up on the summit of Mohawk Mountain in northwest Connecticut is a large flat rock that holds the heat of the sun long after the last of the late sunset has left the sky. We take our picnic up there and then lie on the rock and watch the stars, one pulsing slowly into the deepening blue, and then another and another and another, until the sky is full of them.

A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."

L'Engle's books were among those stars that shone for me as a child, and as an adult. Her legacy will be long appreciated.