With the onset of 2010 - after completing a reading list for the year - I have been turning pages diligently, slowly completing chapter after chapter, resulting in an opened mind, challenged heart, and many completed books! A small stack of those books lay on my desk to review. When the new year emerged and reading ensued I knew I would need to employ a highlighter if I were to adequately record the truths gained. Often, God seems to speak to me through my reading list - a truth confirmed countless time and in a myriad of ways.
Without further Ado, I introduce you to...A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle.
To be entirely transparent, I have put off reviewing this book because I've harbored fear that my simple words won’t do it justice. This book truly inspired me while offering immense consolation to my artistic, creative sides. Her own vulnerable accounts of her failures as a writer were riveting. My soul resonated with so much of her statements that I began to view her words as gold. I was almost sure - at times - that I was sitting in a room listening to her personally tell me stories, like I was sitting at the feet of my own grandmother. There is a refreshing honesty about it, due to the book being assembled in part from bits and pieces of her own journals throughout the years.
Many of you know the author's name for her highly acclaimed children's books such as A Wrinkle in Time along with dozens of others. I have often remembered Madeleine speaking of her many rejection slips - the quantitiy being enough to wallpaper her office. The funny thing is, it only took one publishers "yes", to counter all the "no’s". That yes even invoked jealosy in many publishers who quickly wrote off A Wrinkle in Time deeming it "silly stuff that kids would never read." Her method of working through the rejection, hurt and self-pity was both fascinating and revelatory for me.
The best way I can describe this book in whole is that it resembles a quilt. A homemade quilt has many fabrics differing in pattern and color, many of them very bright. Many of these fabrics do not really “match” except that the small squares are beautiful as a whole when put together. Similarly, A Circle of Quiet is a collection of beautiful thoughts which produces raw, vulnerable soul-piercing introspection and reflection. Lastly, I leave you with the highlighted quotes that are memory worthy. The words that will both encourage and move any creative spirit.
"To Define Everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy." Page 31
"I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance." Page 38
"If we are given minds we are required to use them but not limit ourselves by them." Page 43
"An IQ cannot measure artistic ability." Page 43
"The creative impulse, like love, can be killed but it cannot be taught. What a teacher or librarian can do, in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned this providing of oxygen is the noblest of all vocations." Page 45
"One of the greatest weapons of all is laughter, a gift for fun, a sense of play which is sadly missing from the grownup world." Page 99
"When I look back on that decade of total failure - it's been a mixture, both before and since - there was even on the days of rejection slips, a tiny, stubborn refusal to be completely put down." Page 38