Birthday Wishes

I finished A Circle of Quiet today.  I cried.  As I have said before, when I read a book it’s as if I’m having a conversation with the author.  This book was even more like that because of the rambling style in which it was written, as if Madeleine and I were walking in the…

What is truth?

“A great work of the imagination is one of the highest forms of communication of truth that mankind has reached.  But a great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or to agree with it.  A great piece of literature simply is.  It is a vehicle of truth, but it…

Burning the Creative Flame

“There are educationists (as jargon has it) who think that creativity itself can be taught, and who write learned, and frequently dull, treatises on methods of teaching it.  It is rather as though they were trying to eat air, with the usual result.  The creative impulse, like love, can be killed, but it cannot be…

A Special Place

Do you have a special place?  Madeleine L’Engle’s is a spot by a brook, out past the lawn, trees, stone wall, and apple trees on her Crosswicks property.  “Ontology:  the word about the essence of things; the word about being.  I go to the brook because I get out of being, out of the essential. …

Wise Words

I am reading A Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle.  How I wish she was still alive!  I would love to sit down with her over lunch and discuss books and ideas.  She had so many wise things to say.  Here is just one of them:  “A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn’t diminish…