Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? (2 page)

Sometimes. But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

Writing fiction is definitely a universe disturber, and for the writer, first of all. My books push me and prod me and make me ask questions I might otherwise avoid. I start a book, having lived with the characters for several years, during the writing of other books, and I have a pretty good idea of where the story is going and what I hope it's going to say. And then, once I get deep into the writing, unexpected things begin to happen, things which make me question, and which sometimes really shake my universe.

When I was working on
A Wind in the Door
, I had all the human characters, Meg and Charles Wallace and Calvin and the Murry parents. I had Progo, the cherubim, and Louise the Larger, the snake, Blajeny, the teacher, and the terrible three Mr. Jenkinses. And I was totally bogged down. My story was not moving; it was simply refusing to go where I had expected it to go.

And just at that point my oldest and closest friend, who is a physician, sent me an article on mitochondria from
The New England Journal of Medicine.
Did that article ever disturb my universe! I had never before heard of mitochondria. When I was in school there was no such subject as cellular biology, and if there had been, I would have avoided it. But I read that article and I knew that my book wanted to go into a mitochondrion.

So, I had to learn cellular biology. I had to learn a lot more cellular biology than actually appears in the book so that the cellular biology that is there would be accurate.

I'm frequently asked about my “great science background,” but I have no science background whatsoever. I majored in English literature in college. We were required to take two languages and one science or two sciences and one language, so of course I took two languages and psychology. Part of my reluctance about science was that when I was in school, science was proud and arrogant. The scientists let us know that they thought they had everything pretty well figured out, and what they didn't know about the nature of the universe, they were shortly going to find out. Science could answer all questions. The most interesting thing I did in science was when I was in high school, where chemistry was a requirement for those going to college. The chemistry lab was in an old greenhouse, and one day while I was happily pretending to myself that I was Madame Curie, I blew up the lab.

Many years later, after I was out of school, married, and had children, the new sciences absolutely fascinated me. They were completely different from the pre-World War II sciences, which had answers for everything. The new sciences asked questions. There was much that was not explainable. For everything new that science discovered, vast areas of the unknown were opened. Sometimes contemporary physics sounds like something out of a fairy tale: there is a star known as a degenerate white dwarf and another known as a red giant sitting on the horizontal branch. Can't you imagine the degenerate white dwarf trying to get the red giant off the horizontal branch?

Then there are tachyons. Tachyons move at a speed faster than the speed of light, and for the tachyon, therefore, time moves backward, as it did for Merlin in
The Once and Future King
. The new sciences probe the universe with great imaginative leaps and nourish the world of story, of Let's Pretend and Make Believe and Yes, But What If (but I suspect that a degenerate white dwarf would horrify some of the vigilante groups, and perhaps mitochondria do, too, boggling the timid imagination), with their joy in the loveliness of creation unfolding through the stars at night, the crystal uniqueness of snowflakes, the sense of reverence for much which cannot be exhaustively proved.

Disturbers of the universe do not always disturb it well, however, nor always for the benefit of humankind. Hitler was a great universe disturber. Khomeini is only one of a great many destructive universe disturbers all across the planet today.

So perhaps one of the most important jobs of the writer whose books are going to be marketed for children is to dare to disturb the universe by exercising a creative kind of self-censorship. We don't need to let it all hang out. Sure, kids today know pretty much everything that is to be known about sex, but we owe them art, rather than a clinical textbook. Probably the most potent sex scene I have ever read is in Flaubert's
Madame Bovary
where Emma goes to meet her lover, and they get in a carriage and draw the shades, and the carriage rocks like a ship as the horses draw it through the streets. How much more vivid is what the imagination can do with that than the imagination-dulling literal description!

I do not believe that any subject is in itself taboo; it is the way it is treated which makes it either taboo or an offering of art and love. On my personal censorship scale, showing violence as admirable is taboo. Showing the sexual act as the only form of love allowed the human being is taboo. Back when the early human being lived in caves or in the trees, we had to breed aggressiveness into ourselves in order to survive. We had to be able to kill wild animals, protect ourselves against hostile tribes. But now we have come to a point in the history of the human being where we are going to have to breed this kind of aggressiveness out of ourselves if we and the planet we live on are to survive.

Back in those primitive days, we had to breed into ourselves a powerful sex urge if we were to continue to exist as a species. The world was sparsely populated; few children lived to be adults; we had to produce as many as possible. Now, on our overcrowded planet, we must rediscover friendship and love and companionship, as the need to propagate the species as rapidly as possible becomes not only unnecessary but questionable, in a world where more and more people are starving. Do you realize that the word
relationship
came into the vocabulary only a decade or so ago? Before that we had love and friendship; now we talk of relationships. And a relationship is not fulfilled unless it ends in bed. If two men or two women share an apartment together it is, therefore, immediately assumed that it is for erotic reasons, rather than companionship or financial necessity in this day of exorbitant rents. One can have a relationship without commitment. To love, or to be a friend, demands commitment. Friendship and love need to be redeemed, and if saying that is disturbing the universe, it is disturbing it in a creative way.

A friend of mine who is teaching a high school class in marriage counseling told me that when she has asked her students what constitutes a marriage, none of them has yet come up with anything beyond the notion of romantic, erotic love. What happens when that first, marvelous surge of romance is gone? Is there nothing more enduring to take its place? Perhaps it is in story that we can give our young people glimpses of a wider kind of life.

I also want to practice self-censorship in my use of vocabulary. People who are constantly using four-letter words usually do so because of the paucity of their vocabulary. If you want to swear really elegantly, go to Shakespeare and the other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers; they know how to use words. The use of limited vocabulary has always struck me as immoral: how is a child to learn vocabulary if the child is urged to stay within what the educational establishment has decided is a fourth-grade or a seventh-grade level? Certainly, in the late fifties and early sixties, when limited vocabulary was popular, the word
tesseract
was not to be found on any approved list.

We think because we have words, not the other way around, and the greater our vocabulary, the greater our ability to think conceptually. The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians—because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.

I teach a group of eleventh and twelfth graders a class in Techniques of Fiction once a week, and each year one of the assignments I give them is to take one act of any play of Shakespeare's they choose, read it with a pad in front of them, and jot down the words they really like, but which are no longer current in everyday vocabulary. I ask them to put these words into sentences, and then to try to start using them, bringing them back into their daily conversation. It saddens me that each year the words they choose are words that were in the average teenager's vocabulary only a few years ago. It was far easier for me to read Shakespeare when I was in high school than it is for the kids I teach today—not because I was any brighter but because there was more vocabulary available to the average student when I was in school than there is now.

Perhaps one of the cleverest things the communists have done is to make education in this country suspect, so that there is a strong anti-intellectual bias among many people who consider themselves patriotic. I heard someone announce, categorically, that all college professors are communists. That's a pretty ugly way to think. Perhaps education does open our eyes to injustices which make us uncomfortable; if we don't know about them, we don't have to do anything about them. Perhaps people who read and write and have enough vocabulary to think with
are
universe disturbers. But we need to disturb the universe if, as human beings on planet earth, we are to survive. We need to have the vocabulary to question ourselves, and enough courage to disturb creatively, rather than destructively, even if it is going to make us uncomfortable or even hurt.

A librarian friend of mine told me of a woman who came to her and urged her to remove
The Catcher in the Rye
from her library shelves (
The Catcher in the Rye
has long been a favorite of the vigilante groups). The woman announced that it had 7,432 dirty words in it. “How do you know the exact number?” my friend asked. “I counted them.” “Did you read the book?” “No.”

How dreary to spend your time counting dirty words, but not reading the book. And how revealing of the person who is counting. We do find what we look for.

So let us look for beauty and grace, for love and friendship, for that which is creative and birth-giving and soul-stretching. Let us dare to laugh at ourselves, healthy, affirmative laughter. Only when we take ourselves lightly can we take ourselves really seriously, so that we are given the courage to say, “Yes! I dare disturb the universe.”

Lecture presented at the Library of Congress, November 16, 1983.

Introduction to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of
A Wrinkle in Time

It's twenty-five years since the publication of
A Wrinkle in Time
, and longer than that since I wrote it, and it is hard to believe that more than a quarter of a century has passed.

When I wrote
Wrinkle
, I was in a state of transition. We had been living in northwest Connecticut for nearly a decade, and were ready to move back to New York City. When we left the frustrations and stresses of Manhattan and decided to raise our family in the protected environment of a small, dairy-farm village where there were more cows than people, my husband thought he had left the theater forever. But forever (to my joy) was over, and Hugh was going back to the theater, and this move was going to be what is now called “culture shock” for our children. So we bought a tent and five sleeping bags and set off on a cross-continent camping trip.

As we crossed the vast North American continent, I continued the thinking that had begun a few months earlier when I had stumbled across a book of Einstein's and discovered that for me higher math is easier than lower math. My background in science was nil, and in any case the new sciences that excited me weren't being taught when I was in school and college.

There's nothing like marriage, children, leaving home (I was born in Manhattan) to start one asking all the old questions: What does life mean? Does it matter? What is the universe like? Is there a pattern and a plan? And am I part of it?

The old philosophies left me unsatisfied. The religious establishment made the mistake of answering the great questions to which there are no answers, only new questions. I would walk the dogs at night, looking at the incredible sweep of stars above me, and philosophies and theologies centered only on this planet, and usually on only a small segment of the population, seemed totally inadequate. They left me hungry for something more marvelous.

We left on our cross-country trip in the early spring of 1959 and the first idea for
Wrinkle
came to me as we were driving across the Painted Desert. The names Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which simply popped into my head. I turned around in the car and said, “Hey, kids, I've just thought of three great names, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which. I'll have to write a book about them sometime.” And so the names of the three cosmic bag ladies went into the subconscious creative slow cooker. In the evenings, in the tent, I read from the box of books I had brought with me: more Einstein; Planck, and his quantum theory; books on the macrocosmic world of astrophysics; books on the microcosmic world of particle physics. There I found ideas about the nature of being which stimulated and fascinated me. When we got home, my husband went right into a play, and I sat down at the desk and typed out, “It was a dark and stormy night,” and the book poured out of my fingers. Evenings, I would read to my children what I had written during the day, and they would say, “Oh, Mother, go back to the typewriter!” (They didn't always say that.)

When I finished the manuscript, I was drained and excited. I believed it to be not only totally different from my six previously published books but by far the best thing I had ever written. My children loved it; my husband loved it; my agent loved it. I hoped that its publication would end a decade during which I had received countless rejection slips for more traditional books, half a dozen of which are still in typescript on my shelves.