Oh my oh me oh dear I do so love Madeleine L'Engle. It almost doesn't matter what the books are about - for me she's always a dead cert, as they say.
This one was sadder than the others, I thought. Not only because a lot of characters went through a lot of pain, but also because the book's resolution relates more clearly to real life than some of the others in this series or family or whatever you want to call it. A great deal of it seemed to be about the importance of choices - how a single person's life can change the world. Which is hopeful and totally depressing at the same time.
Sometimes I wonder if we don't even need evil to destroy the world - carelessness seems to be doing a fine job on its own. A great many things are all floating around in my head - beer bottles on beaches, politics, unborn babies, how "we are the first culture in danger of amusing ourselves to death" - and it's making me feel muddled. I always feel a bit weird while I'm reading, and right after I've finished a Madeleine L'Engle, but, without being fanciful, I think I can say that this feeling is a bit different than normal.
Maybe that's what she planned. You know, to give the reader a "now get up and go make the world better!" sort of feeling. She did a good job, if that's what she wanted.
This is a teensy bit unrelated (though the connection makes perfect sense in my mind), but this morning I read that 3,000 babies are aborted in the U.S. every day. I can have compassion, I can listen, but no matter how hard I try I can't understand.
"Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest"
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