Time Travel

Usually by mid-March there are signs that spring is pushing through the earth in Central Park. This year the trees are bare and sway and blow in the blustery winds and storms that have been traveling up the coast or sweeping across the country on an almost weekly schedule.

Now what I think about are spring clothes. Pretty floral dresses worn with pastel colored sweaters. It’s a fantasy, of course, as the weather dictates more of the same: down jackets, turtle-neck sweaters and wool pants. Disney’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, based on Madeline L’Engle’s classic book, published in 1962, has arrived in the theaters at just the appropriate moment, as it feels like a good time to travel into the fifth dimension.

“Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”

If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, may I recommend both? Whether or not you like the story, and you will find it filled will possibly too many ideas, you will, nevertheless, be enchanted by the characters of Mrs. Which, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Whatsit as seen through the eyes of Meg, Calvin and young Charles Wallace.

Madeline L’Engle, as an author and individual, lived a life that has always fascinated me. She spent years working and volunteering in the Library at the Diocesan House of Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In fact, she had such a presence there the Library is now a dedicated literary landmark in honor of the nearly four decades she spent there.

According to the information available through the Cathedral, in the 1960s, a few years after the publication of A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle was looking for a quiet place to work and asked if she could write in the Cathedral’s library. In her own words, she described her relationship with the library:

“About 21 years ago I was writing in the bedroom of our apartment, not the best place in the world, with an actor husband apt to wander in and out. I knew about the Cathedral Library because I was one of the people who came into the beautiful, oak-paneled room to take out books.”

After L’Engle received permission the librarian was called to jury duty and never returned. “I wasn’t at all displeased to learn that… I, in fact, had inherited the job,” she wrote. “The title, that is. It very quickly became a volunteer job and still is.” Until 2002, when her health began to fail, whenever she was in New York, Engle could be found at the library every weekday, writing, meeting with people, and keeping the library open for use.

A woman of style and energy. A curious explorer hoping to make a difference in the world and helping others recognize how to discover lightness over dark – or, good over evil.

I leave it to you to review A Wrinkle in Time, both the book and the movie. It is, whatever you think, a lovely diversion from the snow that has been predicted for later this week. There has always been a question of whether or not A Wrinkle in Time was written for adults or children. I hope all of us have maintained some of the vivid imagination and innocence we experienced when we were young. After all, those were the days that shaped our lives.