DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 260 428 CS 209 213

AUTHOR L'Engle, MadeleineTITLE Dare to be Creative! A Lecture Presented at the

Library of Congress (Washington, DC, November 16,1983).

INSTITUTION Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.REPORT NO ISBN-0-8444-0456-XPUB DATE 84NOTE 30p.; Publication sponsored by the Center for the

Book and the Children's Literature Center of theLibrary of Congress.

PUB TYPE Books (010) -- Viewpoints (120)--

Speeches /Conference Papers (150)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS *Authors; Books; Censorship; *Childrens Literature;

*Creative Writing; *Fiction; Literature Appreciation;Novels; Publications

IDENTIFIERS *L Engle (Madeleine)

ABSTRACTThis publication forms part of a program aimed at

stimulating public interest in books, reading, and the written wordand contains a lecture which was originally presented at the Libraryof Congress as a major contribution to the annual celebration ofNational Children's Book week. After an introduction by SybilleJagusch, the lecture begins with the question, "Do I dare disturb theuniverse?" from the poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. Using the term "disturber of the universe" as the basictheme, the lecture goes on to discuss censorship, the reading ofchildren's books, writing fiction, love, and friendship. (EL)

************************************************************************ Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made ** from the original document. ************************************************************************

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Dare?o he

Creative!

A Lecture presented

at tlx Library of Congress

November 16, 1983, by

Madeleine L'Engte

Library of Congress

Wasifirigton

1984

BEST COPY AVAILABLE

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataL'Englc, Madeleine.

Dare to be creative!

Supt. of Docs. no.: LC 1.2:024I. ChildrenBooks and readingAddresses, essays,

lectures. 2. Children's storiesAuthorshipAddresses,essays, lectures. 1. Library of Congress. II. Title.2103ZL47 1984 808.06'8 84.600052ISBN 0-8444.0456X

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Preface

HE Center for the Book and the Children'sLiterature Center in the Library of Congress arepleased to sponsor the publication of MadeleineL'Engle's thoughtful lecture about the writing, thewriters, and the reading of children's books. As amajor contribution to the Library's annual cele-bration of National Children's Book Week, MissL'Engle's talk was presented on November 16,1983, to a capacity crowd in the Library'sCoolidge Auditorium. Many of her admirersbrought copies of her books with them, par-ticularly the ever-popular A Wrinkle in Time,winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal for the year's"most distinguished contribution to children'sliterature."

The Center for the Book was created by an Actof Congress in 1977 to stimulate public interestin books, reading, and the written word. Its ac-tivities are aimed at both general and scholarlyaudiences. The center brings together members

4of the book, educational, and business commu-nities for symposia and projects. Its program,which includes publications, lectures, and eventsthat enhance the role of the book in society, issupported by private gifts from individuals andcorporations.

The mission and activities of the Children'sLiterature Center, which was established in 1963,are described in the introduction by SybilleJagusch, who was appointed chief of the Children'sLiterature Center in the spring of 1983. It is ourhope that this partnership between two bookcenters within the Library of Congress willbroaden the horizons of each and help remindour citizens of the unique resources available atthe Library of Congress for the promotion andstudy of children's books and literature.

lohn Y ColeExecutive DirectorThe Center for the Book in the

Library of Congress

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Introduction

HAT could be a more pleasurable and far-reaching task than drawing attention to one ofthe world's richest collections of children's booksand related materials?

The Children's Literature Center at the Libraryof Congress has enjoyed this privilege for thepast twenty-one years. Beyond pointing to Libraryholdings, the center has attempted to point to thecreative elements of the children's books them-selves, by letting authors and illustrators speak tothat subject from firsthand knowledge. MadeleineL'Engle, the most recent National Children'sBook Week speaker at the Library of Congress,presents here her view of creativity.

Children's books and other materials relatingto the culture of the child have been selected andadded to the collections of the Library of Con-gress since the 1870s, when they began to be re-ceived as copyright deposits. Yet it took the Libraryalmost a century to open an office which wouldaddress itself explicitly to the acquisition, docu-

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mentation, and provision of reference servicesconcerned with the specialized field of children'sbooks and related media.

Under the direction of its first head, VirginiaHaviland, former readers' adviser for children at theBoston Public Library, the Children's Book Sectionopened its doors to the public on March 3, 1963.Despite a minuscule staff, the office carried out itsmain function as outlined initially in a proposal pre-pared by Frances Clarke Sayers, who, representing ajoint committee of the American Association of

,University Women and the Association for Child-hood Education International, had lobbied for theestablishment of such a unit.

From the beginning, reference work was carriedout and numerous bibliographies were prepared.The section served as a recommending agent for theLibrary's acquisition and collection developmentprogram, initiated an annual lecture during NationalChildren's Book Week, and participated in Libraryexhibits. The section's staff acted as Library of Con-gress representatives to national and internationalorganizations and associations.

A major reorganization of the Library of Con-gress initiated in 1978 by Daniel J. Boorstin,Librarian of Congress since 1975, affected almostall parts of the Library, including the Children'sBook Section, renamed the Children's LiteratureCenter. The change proved to be more thanmerely administrative. By joining such diverseoffices as the American Foliclife Center, the

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National Library Service for the Blind and Phys-ically Handicapped, and the Center for the Bookunder the direction of the Associate Librarian forNational Programs, the Children's LiteratureCenter received a more defined, nationally ori-ented charge. This new function was explainedby The Librarian of Congress in his 1978 annualreport, when he described these divisions as"unique programs of the Library that provide na-tional leadership in specialized areas!"

The center's major goals continue to includeplaying an active role in the acquisition, docu-mentation, and dissemination of informationconcerning all materials relating to the informa-tional and recreational needs of the child. Thecenter must strive to explore the Library's hold-ings and to make them not only known but ac-cessible to the specialist or researcher and to thegeneral public. Its office in the Thomas JeffersonBuilding houses a small collection of basic refer-ence works, monographs, and serials in Englishand selectc other languages on various aspectsof children's books and other media. The center'soffice also serves as a public reading room.

Contrary to what most of our readers expect,the Children's Literature Center is not a custodialdivision. The large doors leading from its office 7to the adjacent pavilion do not open onto a vaultof the Library's estimated 300,000 early and con-temporary children's books and related materials.Neither are the numerous collections of chil-

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dren's books in approximately sixty languageshoused anywhere nearby.

The visitor eager to see some children's bookstacks can catch a glimpse of those grouped to-gether close to the Main Reading Room in thePZ section of the LC classification: belles lettres,poetry, folklore in the English and European lan-guages. All nonfiction books, however, areshelved with their respective subject areas. Chil-dren's materials are scattered everywherethroughout this complex collection. For example,many foreign-language books are acquired andhoused by the respective language divisions; chil-dren's maps are not only acquired but catalogedby the Geography and Map Division; children'speriodicals are shelved in the general collectionof bound periodicals; rare children's books arepart of the Rare Book and Special Collections Di-vision; children's books with musical scores canbe found in the Music Division; original chil-dren's book art is maintained in the Prints andPhotographs Division; children's books in brailleare housed by the National Library Service forthe Blind and Physically Handicapped; and asampling of pop-up books is kept on the center'sown shelves. Many boxes of uncataloged foreign-language children's materials are shelved in thestacks, accessible only to the initiated public orstaff. The Children's Literature Center has itshands full acting as a clearinghouse for all theseriches.

Users of the center can be grouped broadlyinto those dealing with the production, dis-semination, or evaluation of children's materials(for example, editors, film producers, illustrators,or reviewers); the general public; governmentagencies or bodies relating to the welfare of thechild; and those serving children directly (li-brarians and teachers).

Aside from its main function of informationretrieval, the center has other ways of pointingto the Library's rich resources. One of the mostpleasant and visible has been the center's Na-tional Children's Book Week lectures. Since 1963the center has invited national and internationalchildren's book creators, including MauriceSendak, Erik Haugaard, and Astrid Lindgren, tospeak at the Library.

Madeleine L'Engle, this year's lecturer, was re-ceived enthusiastically by an audience that ob-viously knew her writings well. Her readers havelong appreciated both her ability to tell a goodstory and the values she imparts to us: a belief inthe positive strength of the individual, apprecia-tion for the power and kindness of family bond-ing, and faith in a supreme force that guides andprotects us and provides us with hope.

Madeleine L'Engle makes us believe that we 9too can succeed if we will dare to be creative.

Sybil le jaguschChiefChildren's Literature Center

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Dare to be Creative!Madeleine L' Engie

0 I dare disturb the universe ?" asks T.S.Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock. Its not an easy qua-,tion, and there are no easy answers. Robert Cor-mier, in his cautionary tale The Chocolate War,has his young hero ask J. Alfred's question, andbecause this is not a novel of realism, as manypeople think, but a cautionary tale, the answer is,"You'd better not dare, because if you do, you'llget hurt." In this book, Cormier takes somethingwhich is already in existence in a small way andhas it burst out into enormous proportions, insomewhat the same way that James Clavell doesin The Children's Story, a small chill book whichhe was inspired to write when his daughter camehome from school, having been taught by rote tosay the pledge of allegiance, gabbling it with nounderstanding, and he saw how easily the tendermind of a child can be manipulated.

The writer whose words are going to be readby children has a heavy responsibility. And yet, 13despite the undeniable fact that children's mindsare tender, they are also far more tough thanmany people realize, and they have an opennessand an ability to grapple with difficult concepts

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which many adults haviost. Writers of chil-dren's literature are se apart by their willingnessto confront difficult estions.

Perhaps for this r ,on, the content of chil-dren's books is of te a matter of controversy.There are, of course, built-in restraints in thewriting and publishing of a book marketed forchildren. Responsible editors and publishers aregoing to exercise these restraints by refusing topublish a book they consider pornographic, orethnically prejudiced, or in any way potentiallydamaging to children. And here we come to avery fine line: what is the difference betweenhonest editorial advice, and the manipulating ofa writer?

Many years ago, when A Wrinkle in Time wasbeing rejected by publisher after publisher, Iwrote in my journal, "I will rewrite for monthsor even years for an editor who sees what I amtrying to do in this book and wants to make itbetter and stronger. But I will not, I can not di-minish and mutilate it for an editor who doesnot understand it and wants to weaken it."

Now, the editors who did not understandthe book and wanted the problem of evil sof t-peddled had every right to refuse to publish thebook, as I had, sadly, the right and obligation totry to be true to it. If they refused it out ofhonest conviction, that was honorable. If theyrefused it for fear of trampling on someone else'stoes, that was, alas, the way of the world. Finally,

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in John Farrar and Hal Vursell I found a pub-lisher and an editor who did understand the bookand helped me to know what I needed to do tomake it more the book I was trying to write.

After a book is published, we then come to theproblem of outside interference. I am very waryof those individuals who are neither writers noreditors nor even, in some cases, readers, who feelthat they have the right to apply their own moralcriteria to the books in public and school librar-ies. I have enormous respect and admiration andlove for the librarians who are rising up to pro-test this, because they are putting their very jobson the line.

Recently I was lecturing in the Midwest, andthe head librarian of a county system came to mein great distress, bearing an epistle composed byone woman, giving her all the reasons she shouldremove A Wrinkle in Time from the libraryshelves. This woman, who had obviously readneither Wrinkle nor the Bible carefully, was of-fended because she mistakenly assumed thatMrs. What, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which werewitches practicing black magic. I scrawled in themargin that if she had read the text she mighthave noted that they we-e referred to as guardianangels. The woman was also offended becausethey laughed and had fun. Is there no joy inheaven:. The woman belonged to that group ofpeople who believe that any book which men-tions witches or ghosts is evil and must be

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banned. If these people were consistent, theywould have to ban the Bible: what about theWitch of Endor and Samuel's ghost?

The woman's epistle went on to say thatCharles Wallace knew things that other peopledidn't know. "So did Jesus," I scrawled in themargin. She was upset because Calvin sometimesfelt compulsions. Don't we all? This woman ob-viously felt a compulsion to be a censor. Finally Iscrawled at the bottom of the epistle that I trulyfeared for this woman. We find what we arelooking for. If we are looking for life and loveand openness and growth, we are likely to findthem. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil,we'll likely find them, and we may get taken overby them.

On the other side of the censoring coin, therewas an uproar in another midwestern city aboutthe removal from the shelves of The Best Christ-mas Pageant Ever because the word Christmas isin the title. Do we have the right to impose ourown religious beliefs, from no matter which di-rection they come, on the rest of the world? Idon't think so.

Someone sent me a clipping from a daily news-paper containing a list of ten books to be re-moved from library shelves because of theirpornographic content. On the list was one of C. S.Lewis's Narnia books. Also on the list was mybook A Wind in the Door. I am totally baffledand frankly fascinated. This is the first time C. S.

Lewis and I hr : been listed together as writersof pornography. I don't know whether to laughor cry.

We all practice some form of censorship. Ipracticed it simply by the books I had in thehouse when my children were little. If I am givena budget of S500 I will be practicing a form ofcensorship by the books I choose to buy withthat limited amount of money, and the books Ichoose not to buy. But nobody said we were notallowed to have points of view. The exercise ofpersonal taste is not the same thing as imposingpersonal opinion.

When my girls were in junior high school,Mary McCarthy's novel The Group was circulat-ing, underground, among the students. It is abook I happen not to like, though I very muchadmire some of her other books. I read it becauseI knew the girls were going to read it, whether Ipermitted it or not, and I preferred reading itwith them, and discussing it, to having themreading it subversively, behind my back, and per-haps being confused by it. The second chapter isa blow-by-blow account of the sexual act, and Iremarked that when something so private is de-scibed so publicly it loses any possibility of beingabout love. To my delightand rather to my sur-priseI heard my younger daughter, on thephone to her best friend, parroting my words asthough they were her own. And surely that washealthier, having it out in the open, than keeping

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it under cover. There's no easy solution. Therewere books I didn't want my children to read, atleast until they were older. Thoughtless per-missiveness is somewhat like offering a dry mar-tini to a two year old or giving a sports car to afour year old.

As a writer, I have to accept that books that aremarketed as Young Adult Novels are going alsoto be read by the ten year olds. But I, too, readavidly when I was ten. I read every book I couldget my hands on, suitable or unsuitable. How-ever, when I was ten I simply skipped over theparts of the books which were not within thecontext of my own life. The dubious sections ofnovels did not hurt me because I did not under-stand them and skipped over them, just as Iskipped over the sermonizing in some Victoriannovels in order to get on with the story.

And the stories I cared about, the stories I readand reread, were usually stories which dared todisturb the universe, which asked questionsrather than gave answers.

I turned to story, then, as now, looking fortruth, for it is in story that we find glimpses ofmeaning, rather than in textbooks. But how apol-ogetic many adults are when they are caughtreading a book of fiction! They tend to hide itand tell you about the "How-To" book which iswhat they are really reading. Fortunately, nobodyever told me that stories were untrue, or shouldbe outgrown, and then as now they nourished me

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and kept me willing to ask the unanswerablequestions.

I read indiscriminately, and I read what I callOne-Read Books as well as Seven-Read Books. Idon't think the One-Read Books did me muchharm. I read them and forgot them. The Seven-Read Booksand sometimes Ten- and Twenty-Read Booksundoubtedly did influence me.And I wonder how these beloved books wouldfare today with those looking for excuses to banand burn?

I must have read Emily of New Moon at leastonce a month for a couple of years. Emily hasrecently come back into print, and I read it again.It no longer had the same impact it had on mewhen I was ten, but there is still much lovelinessin itEmily's passionate response to the beautyof nature, for instance. But possibly some peoplewould find this suspect, because Emily refers tothe wind as The Wind Woman, and she speaks ofthe Flash, a moment of unexpected glory whichoften comes when least expected.

But of course what meant most to me in theEmily Books was Emily's determination to be awriter, her understanding of the immense work ittakes to write a story, her willingness to listen toa crusty but creative teacher, to learn. Of courseI identified with Emily. And Emily also had atouch of her Scottish ancestors' second sight. Isuspect this would terrify those who don't takenotice of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go

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bump in the night with the Scottish openness tothe world beyond our immediate senses.

Another favorite was The Wind in theWillows, with its delightful humor, and its deli-cate sense of wonder, especially in the chapter"The Piper at the Gates of Dawn." The SecretGarden, too, was certainly a Seven-Read Book.As a child, I read my mother's copy. I read italoud many years later to a group of half-a-dozenlittle girls on a rainy weekend. And, a generationlater, I had the joy of reading it aloud once againto my granddaughters. It's a perenially lovedbook, because I think we all see something ofourselves in self-centered Mary Lennox, and we,too, are freed as she moves out of the prison ofself into the wider world of love and friendship,for the Secret Garden is as much the garden ofMary's heart as it is the English walled garden.

But the wonder and beauty of Mole's and Rat'sencounter with the great god Pan is immediatelyattacked as being un-Christian, and I was hor-rified to hear that one of the censoring groupswanted to burn The Secret Garden because Dic-con, the Yorkshire boy, mentions the word magic.

Someone sent me this quotation, without giv-ing me the source: "A book is the only place inwhich you can examine a fragile thought withoutbreaking it, or explore an explosive idea withoutfear it will go off in your face. It is one of the fewsources of information left that is served upwithout the silent black noise of a headline, the

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doomy hullabaloo of a commercial. It is one ofthe few havens remaining where a [person's]mind can get both provocation and privacy!'

I wish we were all that open minded in ourthinking and discussing.

One time I was in the kitchen drinking teawith my husband and our young son, and theygot into an argument about ice hockey. I do notfeel passionate about ice hockey. They do. Finallyour son said, "But Daddy, you don't understand!'And my husband said, reasonably, "It's not that Idon't understand, Bion. It's just that I don't agreewith you!'

To which the little boy replied hotly. "If youdon't agree with me, you don't understand."

I think we all feel that way, but it takes a childto admit it. And it's frighteningly true of thosewho would impose their own moral imperativeson the rest of the world, who would ban TheBest Christmas Pageant Ever for being Christian,or A Wrinkle in Time for not being Christian, orthe Narnia books for being pornographic.

We need to dare disturb the universe by notbeing manipulated or frightened by judgmentalgroups who assume the right to insist that if wedo not agree with them, not only do we not un-derstand but we are wrong. How dull the worldwould be if we all had to feel the same way abouteverything, if we all had to like the same books,dislike the same books. For my relaxing reading Ienjoy English murder mysteries, but my husband

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prefers spy thrillers. I like beet greens and helikes beet root. We would be a society of ants ifwe couldn't have personal tastes and honest dif-ferences. And how sad it would be if we had togive up all sense of mystery for the limitr d worldof provable fact. I still can't read The HappyPrince or The Selfish Giant aloud without alump coming into my throat, but I suppose thattalking statues and giants are on someone's hitlist.

Perhaps some of this zeal is caused by fear. But,as Bertrand Russell warns, "Zeal is a bad markfor a cause. Nobody had any zeal about arithme-tic. It was the anti-vaccinationists, not the vac-cinationists, who were zealous!' Yet becausethose who were not threatened by the idea ofvaccination ultimately won out, we have eradi-cated the horror of smallpox from the planet.

It is hard for us to understand the zeal of themedical establishment when Dr. Semmelweissensibly suggested that it might be a good idea ifsurgeons washed their hands after dissecting a ca-daver, before going to deliver a woman in labor.This, to us, obvious suggestion of cleanliness wasso threatening to the medical establishment ofthe day that they zealously set about persecutingSemmelweis. But, thanks to him, many of us arealive because doctors now wash their hands. Ifthe zealots had won, women would still be dyingof septicemia after childbirth.

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Russell suggests that people are zealous whenthey are not completely certain they are right. Iagree with him. When I find myself hotly de-fending something, when I am, in fact, zealous,it is time for me to step back and examine what-ever it is that has me so hot under the collar. Do Ithink it's going to threaten my comfortable nit?Make me change and grow?and growing al-ways causes growing pains. Am I afraid to askquestions?

Sometimes. But I believe that good questionsare more important than answers, and the bestchildren's books ask questions, and make thereader ask questions. And every new question isgoing to disturb someone's universe.

Writing fiction is definitely a universe distur-ber, and for the writer, first of all. My books pushme and prod me and make me ask questions Imight otherwise avoid. I start a book, havinglived with the characters for several years, duringthe writing of other books, and I have a prettygood idea of where the story is going and what Ihope it's going to say. And then, once I get deepinto the writing, unexpected things begin to hap-pen, things which make me question, and whichsometimes really shake my universe.

When I was working on A Wind in the Door,I had all the human characters, Meg and CharlesWallace and Calvin and the Murry parents. I hadProgo, the cherubim, and Louise the Larger, the

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snake, Blajeny, the teacher, and the terrible threeMr. Jenk irises. And I was totally bogged down.My story was not moving; it was simply refusingto go where I had expected it to go.

And just at that point my oldest and closestfriend, who is a physician, sent me an article onmitochondria from the New England MedicalJournal. Did that article ever disturb my uni-verse! I had never before heard of mitochondria.When I was in school there was no such subjectas cellular biology, and if there had been, I wouldhave avoided it. But I read that article and I knewthat my book wanted to go into a mitochondrion.

So, I had to learn cellular biology. I had tolearn a lot more cellular biology than actually ap-pears in the book so that the cellular biology thatis there would be accurate.

I'm frequently asked about my "great sciencebackground," but I have no science backgroundwhatsoever. I majored in English Literature incollege. We were required to take two languagesand one science or two sciences and one lan-guage, so of course I took two languages and psy-chology. Part of my reluctance about science wasthat when I was in school, science was proud andarrogant. The scientists let us know that they

2 4 thought they had everything pretty well figuredout, and what they didn't know about the natureof the universe, they were shortly going to findout. Science could answer all questions. Themost interesting thing I did in science was when

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I was in high school, where chemistry was a re-quirement for those going to college. The chem-istry lab was in an old greenhouse, and one daywhile I was happily pretending to myself that Iwas Madame Curie, I blew up the lab.

Many years later, after I was out of school,married, and had children, the new sciences ab-solutely fascinated me. They were completelydifferent from the pre-World War II sciences,which had answers for everything. The new sci-ences asked questions. There was much that wasnot explainable. For everything new that sciencediscovered, vast areas of the unknown wereopened. Sometimes contemporary physicssounds like something out of a fairy tale: there isa star known as a degenerate white dwarf andanother known as a red giant sitting on the hori-zontal branch. Can't you imagine the degeneratewhite dwarf trying to get the red giant off thehorizontal branch?

Then there are tachyons. Tachyons move at aspeed faster than the speed of light, and for thetachyon, therefore, time moves backward, as itdid for Merlin in The Once and Future King.The new sciences probe the universe with greatimaginative leaps and nourish the world of story,of Let's Pretend and Make Believe and Yes, ButWhat If (but I suspect that a degenerate whitedwarf would horrify some of the vigilantegroups, and perhaps mitochondria do, too, bog-gling the timid imagination), with their joy in the

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2loveliness of creation unfolding through the starsat night, the crystal uniqueness of snowflakes,the sense of reverence for much which cannot beexhaustively proved.

Disturbers of the universe do not always dis-turb it well, however, nor always for the benefitof humankind. Hitler was a great universe distur-ber. Khomeini is only one of a great many de-structive universe disturbers all across the planettoday.

So perhaps one of the most important jobs ofthe writer whose books arc going to be marketedfor children is to dare to disturb the universe byexercising a creative kind of self-censorship. Wedon't need to let it all hang out. Sure, kids todayknow pretty much everything that is to beknown about sex, but we owe them art, ratherthan a clinical textbook. Probably the most po-tent sex scene I have ever read is in Flaubert'Madame Bovary where Emma goes to meet herlover, and they get in a carriage and draw theshades, and the carriage rocks like a ship as thehorses draw it through the streets. How muchmore vivid is what the imagination can do withthat than the imagination-dulling literaldescription!

I do not believe that any subject is in itselftaboo; it is the way it is treated which makes iteither taboo or an offering of art and love. Onmy personal censorship scale, showing violenceas admirable is taboo. Showing the sexual act as

the only form of love allowed the human being istaboo. Back when the early human being lived incaves or in the trees, we had to breed aggressive-ness into ourselves in order to survive. We had tobe able to kill wild animals, protect ourselvesagainst hostile tribes. But now we have come to apoint in the history of the human being wherewe are going to have to breed this kind ofaggressiveness out of ourselves if we and theplanet we live on are to survive.

Back in those primitive days, we had to breedinto ourselves a powerful sex urge if we were tocontinue to exist as a species. The world wassparsely populated; few children lived to beadults; we had to produce as many as possible.Now, on our overcrowded planet, we must re-discover friendship and love and companionship,as the need to propagate the species as rapidly aspossible becomes not only unnecessary but ques-tionable, in a world where more and more peopleare starving. Do you realize that the word rela-tionship came into the vocabulary only a decadeor so ago? Before that we had love and friend-ship; now we talk of relationships. And a rela-tionship is not fulfilled unless it ends in bed. Iftwo men or two women share an apartment to-gether it is, therefore, immediately assumed thatit is for erotic reasons, rather than companion-ship or financial necessity in this day of exorbi-tant rents. One can have a relationship withoutcommitment. To love, or to be a friend, demands

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commitment. Friendship and love need to be re-deemed, and if saying that is disturbing the uni-verse, it is disturbing it in a creative way.

A friend of mine who is teaching a high schoolclass in marriage counseling told me that whenshe has asked her students what constitutes amarriage, none of them has yet come up withanything beyond the notion of romantic, eroticlove. What happens when that first, marveloussurge of romance is gone? Is there nothing moreenduring to take its place? Perhaps it is in storythat we can give our young people glimpses of awider kind of life.

I also want to practice self-censorship in myuse of vocabulary. People who are constantlyusing four-letter words usually do so because ofthe paucity of their vocabulary. If you want toswear really elegantly, go to Shakespeare and theother sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers;they knew how to use words. The use of limitedvocabulary has always struck me as immoral:how is a child to learn vocabulary if the child isurged to stay within what the educational estab-lishment has decided is a fourth-grade or aseventh-grade level? Certainly, in the late fiftiesand early sixties, when limited vocabulary waspopular, the word tesseract was not to be foundon any approved list.

We think because we have words, not the otherway around, and the greater our vocabulary, thegreater our ability to think conceptually. The first

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people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are thewriters, the teachers, the librariansbecausethese people are dangerous. They have enoughvocabulary to recognize injustice and to speakout loudly about it. Let us have the courage to goon being dangerous people.

I teach a group of eleventh and twelfth gradersa class in Techniques of Fiction once a week, andeach year one of the assignments I give them is totake one act of any play of Shakespeare's theychoose, read it with a pad in front of them, andjot down the words they really like, but whichare no longer current in everyday vocabulary. Iask them to put these words into sentences, andthen to try to start using them, bringing themback into their daily conversation. It saddens methat each year the words they choose are wordsthat were in the average teenager's vocabularyonly a few years ago. It was far easier for me toread Shakespeare when I was in high school thanit is for the kids I teach todaynot because I wasany brighter but because there was more vocabul-ary available to the average student when I was inschool than there is now.

Perhaps one of the cleverest things the com-munists have done is to make education in thiscountry suspect, so that there is a strong anti-intellectual bias among many people who con-sider themselves patriotic. I heard someone an-nounce, categorically, that all college professorsare communists. That's a pretty ugly way to

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think. Perhaps education does open our eyes toinjustices which make us uncomfortable; if wedon't know about them, we don't have to do any-thing about them. Perhaps people who read andwrite and have enough vocabulary to think withare universe disturbers. But we need to disturbthe universe if, as human beings on planet earth,we are to survive. We need to have the vocabul-ary to question ourselves, and enough courage todisturb creatively, rather than destructively, evenif it is going to make us uncomfortable or evenhurt.

A librarian friend of mine told me of a womanwho came to her and urged her to removeCatcher in the Rye from her library shelves(Catcher in the Rye has long been a favorite ofthe vigilante groups). The woman announcedthat it had 7,432 dirty words in it. "How do youknow the exact number?" my friend asked. "Icounted them!' "Did you read the book?" "No!'

How dreary to spend your time counting dirtywords, but not reading the book. And how re-vealing of the person who is counting. We dofind what we look for.

So let us look for beauty and grace, for loveand friendship, for that which is creative andbirth-giving and soul-stretching. Let us dare tolaugh at ourselves, healthy, affirmative laughter.Only when we take ourselves lightly can we takeourselves really seriously, so that we are given thecourage to say, "Yes! I dare disturb the universe!'

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Set in the Delphin and Trump Mediaeval types ofProfessor Georg Trump by Pickering Press andFolio Typographers. Designed by John Anderson.

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