reading:

source

i love this book.  i didn't even know madeleine l'engle wrote anything besides the wrinkle in time books until a few weeks ago.  bethany lent me  a circle of quiet and i am devouring it. devouring means something very, very different than it did before children: i manage to read a few pages here and there--while i'm nursing, while i'm walking up and down with a fussy child, in those few moments of quiet after the children go to bed.

it's become our ritual to go somewhere every saturday.  wake up, change diapers, brush teeth, grab the diaper bag, and go.  last saturday we went back to the used book store in our old neighborhood.  i felt so nostalgic as we walked central avenue, but only allowed myself a few moments of wishing (flannery o'connor hated nostalgia most of all; she believed it leads to cynicism).

anyway, this does all have point.

i was looking for this particular book.  when i asked the owner if they might have this book, he asked what genre it would fall under, as the store is arranged topically.  biography? memoir? i kept saying, non-fiction. he said that was too broad.  i realized, it was nearly impossible to describe.  l'engle talks about everything. God, religion, politics, writing, children, pride, marriage, motherhood, death, birth, home.  the subtitle of the book is "the crosswicks journal -- book 1."  but when i described it as a journal, he steered me toward the biographies, and i knew it wasn't there.  needless to say, i didn't find the book.

the genre is difficult to pin down. she is simply writing about life--her life, yes, but somehow it's like reading my own.

i love what she says about marriage. she is commenting to a group of seminar students on the younger generation, which leads to a discussion of marriage. it's long, but read it to the end... the end is the best:

The youngsters' rejection of adults often shocks us so much that we in turn reject the rejection and are angered at the violent means by which they repudiate parents and teachers.  They drop out of school and college because it just doesn't seem worthwhile.  Or they want a college degree without having to work for it.  Or they have trial marriages, or just share a pad, rather than entering into relationships which are intended to last for life, often following the example of parents who have separated or divorced, with the concomitant philosophy that if you try marriage and it doesn't work, you quit.  They are rebelling not against our morality and discipline but against our lack of morality and our lack of discipline.  They are unwilling to commit themselves with promises of fidelity in relationships because they have known too many grownups make these promises and then break them as though they didn't matter. Somehow or other, promises, as well as adulthood, must be redeemed.  My seminar students asked me, 'but isn't it better not to make the promises at all? Isn't it more honest?'


I shook my head.  'No. I don't think so. And I think I do have a right to talk to you about this, because I've been married to the same man for almost twenty-five years, and we love each other more now than we did twenty-five years ago.  When we were married we made promises, and we took them seriously. No relationship between two people which is worth anything is static.  If a man and wife tell me they've never had a quarrel, I suspect that something is festering under the skin. There've been a number of times in my marriage when--if I hadn't made promises--I'd have quit.  I'm sure this is equally true of Hugh; I'm not an easy person to live with.'


I'm quite sure that Hugh and I would never have reached the relationship we have today if we hadn't made promises.  Perhaps we made them youthfully, and blindly, not knowing all that was implied; but the very promises have been a saving grace.

the very promises have been a saving grace. yes.

p.s. we did find some treasures at the bookstore: two dorothy sayers mysteries and three of madeleine l'engle's children's fantasies (josh has never read a wrinkle in time! gasp! we are reading it aloud, currently).