• 07 Dec, 2025 *

Craig Sunter from Manchester, UK. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

For a number of reasons, I’ve been rereading a few books. It’s been enjoyable, rediscovering turns of phrase and plot twists and characters stuck so deeply in memory, you forget they were hiding out in all their clarity until prodded again—and once reawoken, it’s as if you’d first experienced them yesterday, not decades ago. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Roberto Calasso’s Cadmus and Harmony—and in the past couple of days, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time have all reminded me why I loved them in the first place.

I pulled the last one off the library shelf to see whether I’d accurately recalled or just misremembered a scene that appeared in my consciousness out of nowhere. It wasn’t in the book—but I also checked out the next two in the series that got underway with Wrinkle, not being sure which volume might have contained the scene in question. After all, I read that trilogy (expanded since then into a quintet) so often that until that vivid memory came back, they’d all blurred into one story-feeling. And though I didn’t find what I was looking for, I was amazed to be just as intensely caught up in the adventure’s grip this time around as I had been in the fourth grade.

I was also, though, pleasantly unsettled. Mrs. Who’s inability to stop quoting things in other languages, Charles Wallace’s wicked vocabulary and insight into the cause of people’s jealous hatred, all the protagonists’ failure to fit in everywhere but in the dangerous fight for good: it all gave rise to the uncanny feeling that this was the book that formed me, or that at least set me in some definitive way on the path to becoming the language-loving ethicist I’ve turned into. And reading it now as an adult, I can’t possibly see how as a child I would have consciously recognized the references L’Engle’s making throughout, from her biblical citations to (I’m guessing) the play entailed in the name of the planet that hosts the evil brain. Camazotz sounds, after all, a lot like a bumbled Camelot, the anti-utopia where “the rain may never fall till after sundown” for entirely different reasons in each place.1

I probably didn’t pick up, then, on many a thing that would’ve been obvious to educated adults. But what I realize I’ve held all this time so deeply that it feels intuitive is the way that L’Engle depicts what a serious, responsibility-laden, far-from-frivolous thing love is. The only force that sends you to risk your own safety and life, not in a swashbuckling frenzy, but rather when you’re terrified and would rather just hide. Meg’s rescue of Charles Wallace is a largely untheorized example of how Martin Luther King Jr. described love five years after Wrinkle was published: as “ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems…. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love…. we are moving through wrong when we [love].” And the force of its opposite is there, too, in the way that hatred is a welcome player for the big brain of evil, one that for those it inhabits, “does something to their faces and their personalities” and not only lulls them into submission to evil, but also shows that such submission comes with its own human costs, “that hate is too great a burden to bear.”2 Yes, yes, this is all nice, and we’ve heard it over and over again—but it’s easy to say, and easy to dismiss, because the love that these two authors are talking about is so damn hard to live into.

I’ve often gotten the sense that a book finds you when you need it. Why, I wondered yesterday, peering into one possible source of why I am the way I am, did this one find me now?

I was talking last week with a friend about what it is I’ve kept from a religious upbringing, here and now in my areligious present. Most salient in that conversation was its insistence that love as real demand be taken seriously. Not in terms of sappy or dogmatic atonement narratives that enforce rules for good behavior, but something like the realization that if I’m to go honorably through the world, doing my best to protect the planet and so forth, I can’t hate the people around me. I can’t sneer at the neighborhood idiots who blast fireworks in their backyards just because it’s Wednesday; I can’t wish ill upon the ones whose outdoor stereos pound my own home with bass on the weekends or who leave their cars idling for twenty minutes at a time just puffing out CO2 because they can. I can’t dismiss all doings with the cranky right-winger because I’m set on seeing him as an irredeemable asshole. None of that is to say that accountability for these jagoffs’ actions shouldn’t be maintained—but in seeking ways for us to live together amicably, I can’t hate them for their preferences or pastimes, or cluelessness or lack of consideration, or even their ugly political convictions. Even more than that, and more than as a commitment to restore civility in the service of functioning governance, I’m supposed to love them. And given the way that love isn’t just an obligation-free warm feeling, I don’t even know what that could mean, and certainly know I’m far from capable of practicing it: a near-impossible exercise in answering what Simon Critchley might call an infinite demand.3

The conversation and the book, then, are related. L’Engle was the sort of liberal Christian evangelicals love to hate; on the other hand, readers who’ll shut a book at the first hint of religion popping up will be disgusted that in this volume, the writer neither hides her beliefs nor pushes them as even a theme that could be explicitly named.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t at all disturbed or disappointed at understanding what she was doing. If we’re going to bother to write something, why in the world should we pretend to be someone other than we are, to pretend to hold or not convictions that make us who we are? The key here, I think, is L’Engle’s lack of dogmatism or fervor to convert anyone or claim exclusive access to truth. That, combined with bits such as the directive to Meg to hold onto her faults and "stay angry;" with the writer’s openness to other worlds and ways of being, as seen in all the different sorts of good creatures the travelers come across.4 Yes, they seem to hold to the Christian spark in their own ways, but in another author’s hands, I would’ve been rolling my eyes and railing at people’s need to force Jesus down our throats.

The next two volumes await me, and I’ll see whether (and hope that) my appreciation holds. If nothing else, L’Engle can spin an engrossing tale, and in a world where there are already too many words, and too many put together badly, I’d say that’s a massive gift in itself.

1. The lyrics are from Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s “Camelot,” recorded in 1960 by CBS. See AllMusicals.com: https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/camelot/camelot.htm. I think it’s also fantastic that the brain, called “IT,” would now probably be heard-read as “I.T.,” able to serve as an indicator of both the ultra Borg-like rationalism L’Engle originally called out and the multiple tech menaces that do their own gigantic part to dehumanize the present.↩

2. Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here?” in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington (HarperOne, 1992), 176.↩

3. See Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2008) and the follow-up, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso, 2012).↩

4. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 94.↩

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