Bookish Ramblings

Bookish Ramblings

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And today I am talking about the second book in the uh Wrinkle in Time series, A Wind in the Door. Um, these books contain that this second book is just as wild as the first one, because they're just so essentially and fundamentally, as I said the last time, speculative. They're sort of science and sort of fantasy and sort of a whole bunch of things. And it's just super fascinating to read them because it it just it just asks, what if the weirdest things were happening? So, um the last book was in a lot of ways sort of thematically about uh you know, fundamentally about faith, about believing in six impossible things before breakfast, in having trust in in others. It it's sort of it very much leans on this. This one, however, I would say this book is really exemplified by John Dunn. Uh, in particular, the No Man is an Island poem, but most especially the line, any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. And the thing about that line is that this book and the first one are very much about Meg. Um, they she is the essential, central perspective character in the first and the second book. The first book is about her struggles with her impatience, with her hastiness, with her desire to have somebody else solve all her problems, with her learning that, you know, she cannot just expect everyone to fix everything for her, she will have to do it herself. This one. This one is very fundamentally about understanding the love of all mankind, so to speak. And that is, this book specifically raises in the course of it the fact that Meg was able to overcome it in the first book by reaching for how much she loved Charles Wallace, because she loves her her baby brother dearly, and so reaching for that love, being able to love him enough to overcome, you know, the powers of evil in in all of its glory is it's it's fundamental, but in its way it's easy because in this book, she is asked to name, and this is sort of a capital N name, as in, you know, your name is written in the book of life, sort of naming, to name Principal Jenkins, Mr. Jenkins. Now, the thing about Mr. Jenkins is he is a kind of an offensive person, that when Meg or Meg's parents come to him and say Charles Wallace is being bullied, he kind of just shrugs and says, What the hell am I supposed to do about this? Um, that he is unimaginative, he is unempathetic, and you know, any time Meg was sent to his office, he was always, you know, constantly saying things to her about how she just needs to, you know, stop being so contumacious. And the thing is that it's impossible for us to for a person to have genuine fellow feeling for somebody who is just constantly awful to you, constantly awful to your much-beloved siblings, that she just doesn't have the ability, she just doesn't think she can love him because she thinks of love in that sort of very fundamental interpersonal connective way, the way that you love your family or your close friends, or, you know, somebody that you fall in love with. The point is that that's about a deep interpersonal connection and affection that comes from knowing a person and and understanding them on a deeper level. But she doesn't want to, and Mr. Jenkins wouldn't want her to, and Mr. Jenkins wouldn't want to, and so Meg is asked to project herself into that concept of the greater love of mankind. That is, that we are all part of all of humanity, and any man's death diminishes me. Um And this is very fundamentally at the heart of this book. I mean, it's put in ways such as that, you know, the things that are inside of mitochondria are so small that, you know, the the person or creature or whatever, in this case, Charles Wallace, Charles Wallace is the size of a galaxy to the farandola in his mitochondria. Um, the same way that we as regular human people have trouble sort of conceptualizing beyond sort of vague raw numbers about the size of the Milky Way, uh, so too would a farandola have trouble conceptualizing what, you know, being in uh what uh something about the size of Charles Wallace would be. And you know, and so there's a concept of and so there's a certain amount of discussion, of course, of for the want of a nail, the shoe was lost, that poem that culminates on the concept, and all for the want of the horses-shoe nail, that, you know, for the want of the battle, the war was lost, for the want of the war, the country was lost, and all for the want of the horseshoe nail, and that you know, that that concept of one small thing can have knock-on effects. The chaos theory of butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane somewhere else in the world. But this book very fundamentally hits on the point of one does this because that you do this because you care about the fate of everybody, because one should care about everybody. That this is the reason why we have welfare systems is because sometimes a person cannot manage to find a job immediately, cannot functionally work because they have some kind of disability that prevents them from working because of any number of things. And so we have those systems in place to ensure those people don't starve because we should care for other people, because this is a fundamental moral imperative in the species. Um, you know, for humanity. And so when you have this whole scene of this cherubim, which uh we are using the biblical definition of cherubim, which have like 38 eyes and 8,000 wings and 42 legs or something, um, you know, we are we are not talking about uh Rococo uh Baroque Poti, which are tiny fat babies with wings, as cherubs, we are talking about the scary lower level angels that are like, I don't even know what kind of what kind of Cthulhu-esque horror that is that you're describing with all those wings and eyes. But uh that this cherub, which describes itself as a cherubim because it says, I am many things, like you confused me for a whole bunch of dragons, that's because while cherubim is plural, I am plural. I exist in the plural. Um which, you know, is fundamentally just like this series of books to say all things exist in bizarre paradoxes. Um but there's Meg, and she has to find a way to understand and name Mr. Jenkins and and pick out his fundamental essence and figure out which of these three Mr. Jenkins, which of the three of them is the real one. And that she has to find her love for the world at large, for the whole in general, in order to be able to do this. And that the whole thing in this book is about Meg figuring this out, is about the Farandola Sporos learning, you know, bringing himself to understand that he is part of a greater whole, that you know, it's not about finding your place so much as understanding that there are things that we do in our lives because it's good for everybody, because it's helpful for everybody, because as the poem says, you know, uh any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. Um and yes, this is the No Man is an Island entire of itself poem. Uh the point is, though, that that encapsulates this book. I mean, we have we have these concepts about belief and and religion that are in this book. But everything in it, you know, even this scene where they go to sort of this weird pocket dimension-y thing where size doesn't mat the size of all things doesn't matter, and so the smallest physical things, this farandola, exists in the same place and on the same scale as a whole planet, as a human being, as a cherubim, as a whatever teacher Blojenny is. Um that it's about saying all things are of equal importance in the grand scheme of things, but in a very specific sense, that that every person is of equal importance, that we need to treat every person of equal importance, that it doesn't matter how much you personally dislike somebody, uh that what's important is understanding that this is a fellow human being, and this fellow human being needs to be treated and understood with the same respect and dignity as you would any other any person that you actually liked. And it's you know, it's it's such a good message. This is This book is weird. The first book, A Wrinkle in Time is Weird, Wind in the Door is Weird, this whole series is weird, but this one book I feel is perhaps the one with the fundamental, essential theme in it that I have the greatest amount of of of feeling for, that I think is the most valuable and important of its messages, that this one about saying everybody and everything deserves to have the same acceptance and acknowledgement and treatment as the people that you actually like. I think that's a message that cannot be overstated or or overdone. Well, I mean, okay, any message can be overstated or overdone. Goodness knows we all know that. But for the sake of my personal hyperbole, this particular message can't be overstated or overdone. Um so, uh, I think that's actually pretty much everything that I have to say about this book. Uh Meg is a little bit thick in this book. She's she has some difficulty grasping these things, but I think part of it comes down to the notion that Meg is fundamentally not a person who gets literary analysis very well, and so she needs things spelled out to her in a way that other people don't, because she doesn't get it. Um but that's that's just, you know, fundamental character traits. Anyways, uh that's everything on a wind in the door, and I will see you all next week.