Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? Read Free Page B

who consider themselves patriotic. I heard someone announce, categorically, that all college professors are communists. That’s a pretty ugly way to think. Perhaps education does open our eyes to injustices which make us uncomfortable; if we don’t know about them, we don’t have to do anything about them. Perhaps people who read and write and have enough vocabulary to think with are universe disturbers. But we need to disturb the universe if, as human beings on planet earth, we are to survive. We need to have the vocabulary to question ourselves, and enough courage to disturb creatively, rather than destructively, even if it is going to make us uncomfortable or even hurt.
    A librarian friend of mine told me of a woman who came to her and urged her to remove The Catcher in the Rye from her library shelves ( The Catcher in the Rye has long been a favorite of the vigilante groups). The woman announced that it had 7,432 dirty words in it. “How do you know the exact number?” my friend asked. “I counted them.” “Did you read the book?” “No.”
    How dreary to spend your time counting dirty words, but not reading the book. And how revealing of the person who is counting. We do find what we look for.
    So let us look for beauty and grace, for love and friendship, for that which is creative and birth-giving and soul-stretching. Let us dare to laugh at ourselves, healthy, affirmative laughter. Only when we take ourselves lightly can we take ourselves really seriously, so that we are given the courage to say, “Yes! I dare disturb the universe.”
    Lecture presented at the Library of Congress, November 16, 1983.
    Introduction to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of A Wrinkle in Time
    It’s twenty-five years since the publication of A Wrinkle in Time , and longer than that since I wrote it, and it is hard to believe that more than a quarter of a century has passed.
    When I wrote Wrinkle , I was in a state of transition. We had been living in northwest Connecticut for nearly a decade, and were ready to move back to New York City. When we left the frustrations and stresses of Manhattan and decided to raise our family in the protected environment of a small, dairy-farm village where there were more cows than people, my husband thought he had left the theater forever. But forever (to my joy) was over, and Hugh was going back to the theater, and this move was going to be what is now called “culture shock” for our children. So we bought a tent and five sleeping bags and set off on a cross-continent camping trip.
    As we crossed the vast North American continent, I continued the thinking that had begun a few months earlier when I had stumbled across a book of Einstein’s and discovered that for me higher math is easier than lower math. My background in science was nil, and in any case the new sciences that excited me weren’t being taught when I was in school and college.
    There’s nothing like marriage, children, leaving home (I was born in Manhattan) to start one asking all the old questions: What does life mean? Does it matter? What is the universe like? Is there a pattern and a plan? And am I part of it?
    The old philosophies left me unsatisfied. The religious establishment made the mistake of answering the great questions to which there are no answers, only new questions. I would walk the dogs at night, looking at the incredible sweep of stars above me, and philosophies and theologies centered only on this planet, and usually on only a small segment of the population, seemed totally inadequate. They left me hungry for something more marvelous.
    We left on our cross-country trip in the early spring of 1959 and the first idea for Wrinkle came to me as we were driving across the Painted Desert. The names Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which simply popped into my head. I turned around in the car and said, “Hey, kids, I’ve just thought of three great