I was recently speaking with a friend about a book we have both read: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle. “The wonderful thing about this book,” she told me, “is that it’s the sort of book that I can set down at any time, and yet it’s always a joy to pick it up again.”
I understand what she means. The delight of A Circle of Quiet is in the title: it’s a circle, not a line segment. You can’t say where it begins or ends, for it could be either at any given moment. It evokes a kind of effect which L’Engle whimsically calls “isness.” L’Engle writes, “being does mean becoming, but we run so fast that it is only when we seem to stop – as sitting on the rock at the brook – that we are aware of our own isness, of being.”
L’Engle’s theory of isness begs the question: what makes a good book anyway? The popular answer—which is the gimmick of every top-selling book—is anticipation, for it seems to be the goal of every trendy novelist to create a narrative so gripping that “you can’t put it down.” But L’Engle has pulled out the rug from under us. She, has, in essence, created the effect of appreciation entirely without anticipation. L’Engle’s work forces us to the conclusion that anticipation is not only an unmeritorious ingredient, but even an unnecessary one in the construction of a good book. That isn’t to say that anticipation does not have value; it simply does not have the value our culture has assigned to it.
No doubt you are all familiar with the increasingly popular cliché of nearly every teen sci-fi fantasy novel opening. The eighteen-year-old protagonist wakes up tied to a chair in a cold room. She can’t remember her name or who she is, save for a few helpful flashbacks: she was once a normal high-school student with a boyfriend, then there was the man with an eye-patch and a suitcase, a flash of red light, and now she’s here. Now she is suddenly thrust into a dangerous mission where she must use her wits and her mysteriously acquired fighting skills (which she cannot remember how she learned) pitted against a massive complex government conspiracy that evidently threatens the entire human race. Top it off with an appropriately ominous and vague title, something like Demon Run: Red Zone 11, and you have yourself a best-seller. You may very well be the next Veronica Roth.
But one only needs to take an introductory course in psychology to learn how to arouse the appetite of enigma. That isn’t to say that the ability to create a gripping story isn’t a valuable skill—or even an easy skill—to acquire. But it is not the most valuable. Stephanie Meyers can create a gripping story—that does not necessarily make her a good writer. Children will eat any candy if it has enough sugar in it—that doesn’t make it good candy. How did our culture come to believe that the art of anticipation is somehow inherently meritorious? You can detect this thinking in our language when we talk about the idea of “spoilers.” You hear it come up when you are about to tell a friend about a movie you have just seen. Suddenly, someone in the table behind you interrupts your conversation. “Don’t spoil it!” they shout. “Don’t give away the ending!”
I respect their sentiments. I understand the joy of experiencing a good story for the first time, and the thrill that comes with not knowing the outcome. But we are mistaken if we begin to think that knowing the outcome will somehow “spoil” the story. Before I read Bridge to Terabithia for the first time, someone had already told me that Leslie Burke dies at the end of the story (sorry guys…spoilers). But Paterson’swriting invites us to see the world through the eyes of Jess Aarons, and Jess Aarons doesn’t know. Leslie dies every time I read the book, and the effect is no less shocking. Your heart beats fast the first time because you do not know what happens next, but it beats even faster the second time, because you know what happens next.
Lewis famously contended that the test of a good story is whether it can be read again. The unliterary reader, says Lewis, reads merely to “extract the event,” and once he has done so, he throws the book away. But the truly literary reader does not read only for the thrills. Lewis asks us to imagine two different scenarios: imagine a man sleeping outside by the fire. In the first scenario, an Indian saunters up behind him with a tomahawk in hand. In the second scenario, a crook sneaks up behind him with a pistol in hand. Both are dangerous scenarios, no doubt. Either one will grab the reader’s attention. But the whole joy in reading lies not in the danger, but in the quality of the danger. The crook is just a common criminal who is out to get your money. He threatens your life, but there is nothing else really threatening about him. To put it another way, he is merely dangerous. But the Indian—with the wild, rolling eyes, the bare feet, the painted face, the tooth necklaces and bird’s feathers—carries a wholly different kind of terror with him. He brings in his wake a whole wealth of other associations: Nature, sorcery, myth, and numinosity. That kind of terror is something that can be enjoyed over and over again, even if the external events of the plot are the same. Anticipation does to the imagination what food does to the stomach: it feeds. But to read books merely to extract the event is like eating food without tasting it.
In the final installment of The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis begins the story with the following words: “In the last days of Narnia…” From the popular and contemporary point of view, we could call this “bad writing.” Why tell us from the beginning that this is the story of how Narnia ends? Well, apparently, Lewis was not concerned about “giving away the ending.” He expects us to come prepared with the facts, not drowning in half-hearted hopes and wishes. We all die. That’s the end of every human story. We’re not being productive by asking the question of if, or even when. Everyone is born, and everyone dies, and there’s no point in trying to be original about it. The thing that makes one man or woman’s story different from another’s is what happens in between.
At this time of year, our planet has reached the point in space where scientists have somewhat arbitrarily decided that one year ends and the next one begins. But if you think about it, there’s no sign-post in space to tell us that 2017 starts here. Every point in the celestial cycle is completing an entire circle around the Sun when measured from its’ own vantage point. A new year is beginning and ending every moment we are alive. What’s the point in giving away the ending? We are always ending. Every evening is New Year’s Eve, and every morning is New Year’s Day. Our lives should not be centered around the anticipation of one moment, but the appreciation of every moment. Don’t ask yourself what happens next, but “come out of the question and be.” For all this time the Earth has been drawing her circle of quiet around the Sun.
