a mind like that

I am downright gluttonous for amusement. From the moment I wake up, I need to be pulled out of myself somehow. Thanks to the smartphone, that's not too tall an order--with one swipe I turn off the alarm, with the next three I can open the Bible verse of the day, quickly followed by email, Facebook, and the Words With Friends game I'm winning against my mom.

Eventually I can pull myself out of the tiny screen in favor of a larger one (laptop, or sometimes TV), and then onto the printed page (where I can flatter myself to be not enslaved to instant-gratification-entertainment).

I've finished three books in the last 36 hours. Now I am 30 pages away from finishing a fourth. Expect words on Brideshead Revisited this weekend, after my Skype conference with Molly. The other two that I read cover to cover the recently are more reasonably squished into such a short time frame-- A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, both by Madeleine L'Engle, in a series with her more famous A Wrinkle in Time. 

Every time I read those books (and I have done so at least 6 or 7 times), I am amazed at the way Ms. L'Engle's mind works. How is it that she creates such a complex world of interwoven threads of physics, biology, literature, history, mythology, and what-if-that-happened is utterly beyond me. How she then knows that world so intimately that the complex becomes simple and approaches the story with so little drama that children can grasp it is UNFATHOMABLE. 

Hers is a mind capable of focus. Hers is a mind capable of creation. Hers is a mind capable of persuasion.

I don't think I know anybody who functions on a level remotely close to hers, and I wonder-- what does this kind of story-making have to do with my way of life? Am I relient on constant occupation and fast-moving information input because I am incapable of creating anything real enough to engage me? Or have I failed to create anything this real because I have grown so used to exercising the fast-twitch muscles of my brain that I don't want to do anything else?

'Not everybody is able to see me,' he told her. 'I'm real, and most earthlings can bear very little reality.'   (A Wind in the Door)

This goes beyond trouble focusing on a task without getting distracted. This is an issue of directed entrance into a problem, a story, a world, a question that is not inside my control. For me, I feel challenged in this way most often in literature. It calls me out of myself, but not into a void of flashing screens and vapid plots (like much of my phone-flipping and some of my book-reading), but into a world somehow solider than I am. It's all kinds of scary, but at the same time necessary. Because I want a mind like Madeleine L'Engle's.