Dreams danced at the fringes of my consciousness this morning, but I could not remember a single one of them, not in the heavy, pillowtime blur of the waking mind. Then suddenly my eyes shot open as a name rammed my brain: Madeleine L’Engle.
“What?” I sat up. I got up. I rubbed my head. “Madeleine L’Engle? Where on earth did that come from at 6:52 in the morning?”
I’d never read Madeleine L’Engle. I couldn’t even tell you what nationality she is. I know I’d seen a few quotes of hers in Nancy Nordenson’s book Just Thinking and maybe she was mentioned on Nancy’s blog, but I couldn’t recall anything about L’Engle’s story. Evidently she is on some sort of subconscious list of writers I was meant to get to, but why her name should batter its way into my drowsy brain precisely this morning, I don’t know. Weird. Couldn’t shake the thought, however, so, after dropping Kipp off at a birthday party, I made my way through the insane commotion of the town’s annual Crazy Days celebration and went to the library to see what titles of hers they had in circulation.
A search through the library catalog turned up a great deal of juvenile fiction, as well as one novel in in adult fiction called Camilla. I went to the fiction section to search for it: Len. . . Len. . .there on the very bottom of the shelf, was where it should be, so I plunked down on the floor.
But it wasn’t there. It was missing.
Right there in front of me, however, was F Les. . .for Lessing, Doris. I let my hand fall over her books until I drew one out entitled The Sweetest Dream. Having read Lessing’s autobiographies, I am more familiar with her story than with L’Engle’s, but hadn’t read this particular book. I opened the cover and read the blurb.
You should know that I am hard on blurbs. Roughly 98% of the time, the blurb makes me shove the book right back onto the shelf, before I even get to the third sentence. Most of my reading never comes to me via blurb, anyway, but through a previous book or a recommendation, or a gnome that pushes a book off the shelf.
But this blurb was different. Not only did this blurb appeal, this blurb so amazingly reiterated the predominant thought on my mind all this past week, that my eyebrows shot right up, and I laughed, but quietly, wishing there were someone nearby to whom I could express my amazment (but not any flashers--that's a different library story.) Since last Sunday, after finishing up Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, I’d been thinking (again) about the pendulum swing of human history. . .from one extreme to the other---from the domestic containment of the 1950’s to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970’s. Of course it swings so tremendously, I reasoned, following the cataclysm of World War. If the ground the pendulum stands on is violently shaken, you cannot think that won’t have a profound and disorienting effect on the human psyche for generations.
The blurb from the Lessing book:
The story of a family, spanning most of the twentieth century, has its fulcrum in the Sixties, that contradictory and embattled decade about which argument becomes louder each day. The youth of that time, bursting old bonds and demanding freedoms, were seen by some of their elders in a manner not at all as they saw themselves, as romantic iealists, but as deeply damaged people. Old Julie, the clan’s matriach, knows why. “You can’t have two dreadful wars and then say ‘That’s it, and now everything will go back to normal.’ They’re screwed up, our children are, they are the children of war.”
Will the book live up to the blurb? I intend to read it and find out.
Oh, and as for L’Engle, I haven’t forgotten about her. I did pick up a book of hers as well called Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage. It seems as good a place as any to start. I’m off now for a good read on the porch.
4:55:11 PM 
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