A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'engle

Author:Madeleine L'engle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504041256
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

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Our youngest child, when he first became conscious of vocabulary, often did violence to words in absurd little ways which delighted us. Hugh and I listened seriously, lest we make him self-conscious, or think we were laughing at him. We needn’t have worried; he plunged into vocabulary like a sea gull into water, entirely fascinated with whatever he came up with. Even the laughter of his elder siblings did not deter him, and he is now happily malaproping in Latin, French, and German. One day, aged seven, he came home from school highly indignant because the boys’ gym period had been curtailed. “We only had ten minutes of gym,” he said, “and that was all anesthetics.”

This was not just something to laugh at; it sent me back to my own, dreaded gym periods where anesthetics rather than calisthenics would have been more than welcome. Any team I was on lost automatically; when teams were chosen, mine was the last name to be reluctantly called out, and the team which had the bad luck to get me let out uninhibited groans. I now have this emotion at my fingertips if I need it for a story I’m writing; or if I need it to comfort some child who is going through a similar experience. It does us good to listen to things differently.

I remember “anesthetics” not only because it reminded me of my own pains over gym but because this small, delectable laugh came while I was in the middle of a very bad period, literarily speaking, and needed any reason for laughter, no matter how trivial. A Wrinkle in Time was on its long search for a publisher. Finally one, who had kept the manuscript for three months, turned it down on the Monday before Christmas. I remember sitting on the foot of our bed, tying up Christmas presents, and feeling cold and numb: anesthetized. I was congratulating myself on being controlled and grownup, and found out only later that I’d made a mess of the Christmas presents; I’d sent some heady perfume to a confirmed bachelor, and a sober necktie to a sixteen-year-old girl. So I called Theron, my agent: “Send the manuscript back to me. Nobody’s ever going to take it, it’s too peculiar, and it just isn’t fair to the family.” He didn’t want to send it back, but I was cold and stubborn, and finally he gave in.

My mother was with us for the holidays, and shortly after Christmas I had a small party for her with some of her old friends. One of them, Hester Stover, more than ever dear to me now, said, “Madeleine, you must meet my friend, John Farrar.” I made some kind of disgruntled noise, because I never wanted to see another publisher; I was back to thinking I ought to learn to bake cherry pie. But Hester, going to a good deal of trouble, insisted on setting up an appointment, and I took the subway down to John Farrar’s office. I just happened to have that rather bulky manuscript under my arm.

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