Tesseracts

Madeleine L’Engle died Thursday at age 88. She was born the year after my dad, two years after my mom. I read only one of her children’s books, the most famous, the science fiction A Wrinkle in Time, for which she won the Newberry Award in 1963.

The heroine of this book, Meg, is given time and space travel powers to rescue her scientist father on another planet via the tesseract.

I’ve been thinking about tesseracts for the last few days. Well, not exactly tesseracts. I’ve been thinking about doorways and pathways to be kept open.

I was talking yesterday with Inge about not being as interested in poetry as in photography. “Maybe I’ll stop going to Sapphos” (my poetry group), I said. And she said, “Why decide that? Why close the door? If you say, ‘I’ve stopped writing poetry’ on such-and-such a day, then a couple of weeks later, when you’re inspired to write one, you might say to yourself, ‘Oh, no, I decided I wasn’t going to write poetry any more.’”

Madeleine’s imagination kept doors open.

Douglas Martin in the NYT writes today that she called herself a French peasant cook, who drops a carrot in one pot, a piece of potato in another and an onion and a piece of meat in another.

"'At dinnertime, you look and see which pot smells best and pull it forward . . .The same is true with writing,' she continued. 'There are several pots on my backburners.'"

Thank you, Madeleine.