Childhood truths that span time and space

While we celebrate Pavarotti's inspirational life this week, I wanted to pay another tribute to a person who may have been less well known internationally, but who personally influenced and shaped my childhood: Madeleine L'Engle, a well known writer of classic children's books, who also passed away on September 6, 2007.

My love for works that stretch the imagination started with a giftset of her books from my brother (who I like to call my "own Doctor Who") when I was very very young. L'Engle believed that storytelling "... does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically." To her, "a book, too, can be a star, explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe." Such stories fed my school and college years (coincidentally, Madeleine L'Engle was a Smith '41 alumna) and continue to shape my perspective on life today.

In L'Engle's 1963 acceptance speech for Newberry Medal-winning A Wrinkle In Time, she relates children's stories to "real life":

Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it’s their own world, the world of their daily life, and it’s our loss that so many of us grow out of it.... What a child doesn’t realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairly tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture.

... almost all of the best children’s books do this, not only an Alice in Wonderland, a Wind in the Willow, a Princess and the Goblin. Even the most straightforward tales say far more than they seem to mean on the surface. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn --- how much more there is in them than we realize at a first reading. They partake of the universal language, and this is why we turn to them again and again when we are children, and still again when we have grown up.

L'Engle's influence on me is echoed by Neil Gaiman, another author who I admire, who wrote about the impact that science fiction (namely, Doctor Who) had on his life in The Nature of the Infection, his introduction to Paul McCauley's Eye of the Tyger (excerpts here).

So, in memory of Madeleine L'Engle and her fellow dreamers, I urge us adults to never stifle our imaginations. And to all who nurture our young ones, let's make sure they learn this universal language that transcends the barriers of our world today, spanning time and space.