A Circle of Quiet by Madeline L'Engle

I confess to being extremely disappointed with this book. Not in the book itself - once I got into it I fair enjoyed what she had to say.  It was the deceiving title that threw me. I read the first page or two and along with the title thought that she was writing about a 'Circle of Quiet', the place that she goes when everything in the world is spinning around and she needs a centre, a place to call her own, somewhere that confusion becomes clarity (or, ceases to matter anymore).  "I go to the brook because I get out of being," she writes. "I go to the brook and my tensions and frustrations are lost as I spend a happy hour sitting right in the water and trying to clear it of the clogging debris left by a falling tree."  I love that concept of a place where you truly rest, truly be, and was looking forward to understanding more about having a place like that, letting the mind empty, and unclogging it from the world's debris.

Unfortunately for my expectations, that is not what the book is about at all.

After the first few paragraphs (which is the only bit I read when I decided to buy the book), it turns out that this is simply bits from her journal, thoughts she has had, vague ramblings of the mind. Whilst this may be a nice thing to read, it's not what I set out to read, not what I intended to read, and not what my mind was ready for.  I felt a little like the famous story (famous in our family, and now it will be famous to you as well) of my dad in the Navy, going to the dinner meal and discovering that hash browns were on the menu. There they were, heaped in pieces and waiting to be enjoyed, so he filled his plate as high as he could with them.  With great anticipation he took his first bite, only to discover he was eating sauerkraut. He didn't have a very strong feeling towards sauerkraut before that, but unfortunately in the Navy the food you take is the food you eat, and he had to finish the entire plateful.  His eagerness dimmed to disappointment and then weariness and then loathing, so that he has almost never touched sauerkraut since.  I doubt I'll steer clear of Madeline L'Engle in future - I still like her writing, especially her children's books, and I agreed heartily with much of what she had to say in this book - but I have no desire to read volumes 2 or 3 of this series, and still feel a bitter taste in my mouth having finished it.

Of course, that all being said, if you'd like to read something that's a rambling journal of thoughts, like the 'morning pages' suggested by the Artist's Way, then this is the book for you.  It's philosophical for the most part - her thoughts on life, love, God, purpose, writing, and society - which for me was a bit hard work. Anything that presents an alternate view of how to look at the world (L'Engle is an agnostic) takes thought and effort, and I was prepared to read something easy, something that flowed. It does flow, but flows like a river.  A real river, with rocks and sticks and fish and waterbugs and a few rapids and whirlpools and tree branches and noise.

So, I thought I'd just include a few quotes from the book that struck me, so you can enjoy them. I would recommend the book - just with that careful caveat of what it's really about!

"To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy."

"I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their validity, no matter what." [This is remarkably true of me in every particular.]

"Love is not an emotion. It is a policy." -Hugh Bishop

"If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed within his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth."

"Sometimes, doing violence to language means not using it at all, not being afraid of being silent together, of being silent alone. Then, through the thunderous silence, we may be able to hear a still, small voice, and words will be born anew."

"We tend, today, to want to have a road map of exactly where we are going. We want to know whether or not we have succeeded in everything we do.  It's all right to want to know - we wouldn't be human if we didn't - but we also have to understand that a lot of the time we aren't going to know."

"Can we produce a single human being like Leonardo, who could reach out into every area of the world of his day? Our children have never known a world without machines: dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, electric heaters...there are more machines than we can possibly count; beware, beware, lest they take us over."  [Note: this was written in 1972.]

"Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children.  Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. It was adults who thought that children would be afraid of the Dark Thing in [A Wrinkle In Time], not children, who understand the need to see thingness, non-ness, and to fight it."

"It's far more exciting to be enthusiastic about the real book that deals with life in all its peculiarity than to allow ourselves to be dazzled with the cheap substitute that tickles the palate for the moment but leaves us with a hangover."

"In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'"

"Beethoven had the right idea: he played one of his sonatas for someone, and when he had finished, the person said, 'That's very nice, but what does it mean?' And Beethoven sat down and played the whole thing over."

"It takes a certain amount of living to strike the strange balance between the two errors either of regarding ourselves as unforgivable, or as not needing forgiveness."

A strange, eclectic compilation, no doubt...and therefore probably a perfect representation from the book. Or, perfect as it reflects what stood out to me.  You might be struck and moved by sentences that entirely passed me by.  That's the beauty of it.  And there is, indeed, beauty there.