Our Meg is Gone

Madeline L’Engle died yesterday of natural causes:

Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88. Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

“Of course I’m Meg,” Ms. L’Engle said about the beloved protagonist of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

L’Engle’s books were casually left around the house by my older sisters, where I would pick them up and have my mind blown. Although I never turned into a scientific genius these were the first books that showed me how science is anarchist, poetic, and damned beautiful. And of course Meg, the clever protagonist, was a literary beacon in a world full of boxcar boys and babysitting clubs. Famously, “Wrinkle” was almost never published, because as L’Engle explains, it “had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn’t done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don’t find, or didn’t at that time, in children’s books.”

Erica Barnett kindly offers an except from “A Wrinkle in Time”:

Here’s an excerpt, in which Mrs. Whatsit attempts to explain time travel to the children. I probably don’t need to tell you that it blew my young mind.

Charles Wallace accepted the explanation serenely. Even Calvin did not seem perturbed. “Oh, dear, ” Meg sighed. “I guess I am a moron. I just don’t get it.”

“That is because you think of space only in three dimensions,” Mrs. Whatsit told her. “We travel in the fifth dimension. This is something you can understand, Meg. Don’t be afraid to try. Was your mother able to explain a tesseract to you?”

“Well, she never did,” Meg said. “She got so upset about it. Why, Mrs. Whatsit? She said it had something to do with her and Father.”

“It was a concept they were playing with” Mrs. Whatsit said, “going beyond the fourth dimension to the fifth. Did your mother explain it to you, Charles?”

“Well, yes.” Charles looked a little embarrassed. “Please don’t be hurt, Meg. I just kept at her while you were at school til I got it out of her.”

Meg sighed. “Just explain it to me.”

“Okay,” Charles said. “What is the first dimension?”

“Well—a line:—— ”

“Okay. And the second dimension?”

“Well, you’d square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension.”

“And the third?”

“Well, you’d square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn’t be flat anymore. It would have a bottom, and sides, and a top.”

“And the fourth?”

“Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you’d square the square. But you can’t take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it’s got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you could call the fourth dimension Time.”

“That’s right,” Charles said. “Good girl. Okay, then, for the fifth dimension you’d square the fourth, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”

For a brief, illuminating second Meg’s face had the listening, probing expression that was so often seen on Charles’s. “I see!” she cried. “I got it! For just a moment I got it! I can’t possibly explain it now, but there for a second I saw it!” She turned excitedly to Calvin. “Did you get it?”

He nodded. “Enough. I don’t understand it the way Charles Wallace does, but enough to get the idea.”

“Sso nnow wee ggo,” Mrs. Which said. “Tthere iss nott all thee ttime inn tthe worrlld.”