There are passages in fiction that still get me choked up every time I read them. The first is the scene with Miser Shen in
Bridge of Birds.
I wrote about that a while back.
Meanwhile I will cry, 'Ah Chen, your father is here!' I can but weep for you, and call your name."
Another is from the end of
the Last Unicorn:
Prince
Lír stood between her body and the Bull, weaponless, but with his hands
up as though he thought he still held a sword and shield. Once more in
that endless night the prince said, "No." He looked very foolish, and he
was about to be trampled flat. The Red Bull could not see him, and
would kill him without ever knowing that he had been in the way. Wonder
and love and great sorrow shook Schmendrick the Magician then, and came
together inside him and filled him, filled him until he felt himself
brimming and flowing with something that was none of these. He did not
believe it, but it came to him anyway, as it had touched him twice
before and left him more barren than he had been. This time, there was
too much of it for him to hold; it spilled through his fingers and toes,
welled up equally in his eyes and his hair and the hollows of his
shoulders. There was too much to hold — too much ever to use; and still
he found himself weeping with the pain of his impossible greed. He
thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so
full.
The Lady Amalthea lay where she had fallen, though now she was
trying to rise, and Prince Lir still guarded her raising his naked hands
against the enormous shape that loomed over him. The tip of the
prince's tongue stuck out of one corner of his mouth, making him look as
serious as a child taking something apart. Long years later, when
Schmendrick's name had become a greater name than Nikos's and worse than
afreets surrendered at the sound of it, he was never able to work the
smallest magic without seeing Prince Lir before him, his eyes squinted
up because of the brightness and his tongue sticking out.
The third comes from
A Wrinkle in Time. I love this
book. I read it for the first time in the fifth grade. I went to a tiny
little grade school, and I had an absolutely astounding number of truly
excellent teachers. Mrs. Race had the class read the book (We each got
our own paperback copy and I wouldn't be surprised if she paid for them
all out of her own pocket), and it remains one of my all-time favorites
to this day.
I think the religious elements of the work would keep it out of most
classrooms today (and Mrs. Race was probably pushing the envelope of
what was acceptable even back then, but she was awesome that way), but
it really shaped my adult understanding of what goodness is.
I've touched on this before, with my pieces on
Mister Rogers and
Superman, but I still believe in goodness, in the human potential, and the human
obligation
to be good.I'm an atheist now, and I have been for a long time, but I
still think it's the best argument for Christianity that I've ever read.
I don't believe in supernatural forces of Good and Evil, but natural
forces of good and evil exist all around us. Evil isn't glamorous; it's
weak and afraid. Good isn't naive or weak or foolish; it's strong and
tender, and above all, loving.
Now, I like a good Revenger's Tragedy of Jacobian Demigods as much as anyone, but not every jerk is a
Byronic Hero.
Sometimes he's just a thug with a grudge. I enjoy reading about heroes
who are essentially good people, but it seems that there are too few,
with goodness too often a mask or a sham. I don't want to be nostalgic
for a past that never was, but I'm more acutely aware of this tendency
with a child of my own. Subversion of apparent goodness is done so often
that it's what I
expect from a storytelling perspective. It's nice to see goodness played straight once in a while.
It's a rare story that features unambiguous goodness. The only pop culture example that springs immediately to mind is
Avatar: The Last Airbender. And
that's not necessarily a bad thing. I like faults in my characters, and
I like nuance, and an easy way of injecting some is introducing certain
shades of grey to a character.
 |
| Madeleine L'Engle |
With that said, I think that L'Engle does a
wonderful job depicting a variety of flawed, but good characters. Meg is
impatient, temperamental and
poisoned with doubt and Charles
Wallace's pride almost swallows him. But their love for each other (and
the love they learn to give themselves) lets them pull through.
The author of a Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle, didn't publish
the book until she was 44, which is inspiring in its own way. Its
publication was delayed by the fact that it's a difficult book for
children to read, but it's probably still a children's book, (it won a
Newberry Medal after all) and it was a science fiction book with a
female lead, which L'Engle said, "just wasn't done at the time." (I
think that the argument can be made, unfortunately, that it still isn't
done.)
To get to the ostensible point of this post, the passage that I like
is that when the characters are in the cave of the Happy Medium and the
characters are talking about humans who have opposed the darkness.
"Who have our fighters been?" Calvin asked.
"Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs. Whatsit said.
Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."
"Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why of course, Jesus!"
"Of
course!" Mrs. Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There were others.
All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by."
"Leonardo da Vinci?" Calvin suggested tentatively. "And Michelangelo?"
"And Shakespeare," Charles Wallace called out, "and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!"
Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. "And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!"
What can I say? I love the sentiment of poets and scientists and humanitarians as the champions of humanity.
It also led to this exchange.
Lily: Who was Einstein?
Me: You've probably seen a picture of him. He was a scientist with crazy hair.
Lily: Is he the guy who walks around the street in the Simpsons game?
Me: (Pause) No, that's Sideshow Bob.
(Later on, I showed her a picture and she said he looked familiar. She just didn't know the name to put to the face)
I commented that I liked this book because it has so many girls
in it. Lily replied "Of Course. Everybody loves super cool girls. Meg
is nice and kind and smart and pretty."
And, of course, not
everyone does love super cool girls. Books and movies are still created
with adolescent boys (and arrested adolescent boys) in mind and women
and girls as heroes are pitifully underrepresented. But I hope that she
hangs on to that belief for as long as she can, and I hope that, by the
time that she would see that it's not true, that things have changed to
the point that it is, and she has all the super cool girls she could
ever want.
