Little bubbles of time
Hello, friends!
Squish is reading her way through Madeleine L’Engle’s Time quintet presently. You know the books: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, An Acceptable Time. It’s a real kick to watch your kiddo get lost in the same books you yourself got lost in. She’s midway through the third book in the series currently.
One of my favorite parts of these novels is the middle-of-the-night conferences that happen among the family members. Wrinkle opens with one such meeting: During a midnight storm, Meg ventures downstairs to find her little brother, Charles Wallace, already preparing cocoa for her; he knew she was coming. There’s a certain feeling on the air. Their mother joins them, and, soon after, the first of the book’s time-traveling witches arrives.
Years later, in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the whole family gathers and waits throughout the night for word of war. They do their best to cheer each other up with words or food, all of them in this little pocket of time, together.
I have a few memories of such midnight meetings. One in particular occurred in Alaska; I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. I couldn’t sleep, and went searching for my parents, who were also still awake, late into the night. They broke out our deluxe Scrabble board, and the three of us sat on their bed, playing. (Other nights when I was unable to sleep, they’d load me into the car and go for a long drive, until I dozed off.)
Another came years later, in Texas. I was visiting my grandparents, and when I couldn’t sleep one night, I wandered into their kitchen and found my grandmother there. By her own account she sleeps very little, and is often awake in the wee hours. She passed me the keys to her van, and suggested a drive. We drove around Houston in the dark hours between night and morning, riding the 610 loop awhile. She regaled me with stories of being my age, fond memories of mistakes she’d made before shaping up.
In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury captures a similar moment in the story “Night Meeting”: A young man ventures into the dark hills of Mars, on his way to a distant party. He pauses to eat something while looking over a dead canal; he’s met there by one of Mars’s original inhabitants. The two introduce themselves, and come to realize they see different things: Where the young man sees a dead city in the distance, the Martian sees a thriving metropolis. They come to understand that some magic of the night, some slip in the gears of time itself, has brought them to this place, to see past and future from their own respective presents.
There’s a delightful scene much like this one in Mad Men. Here’s what I wrote about it in a Dark Age letter:
It’s very late. Don Draper has come home from the hospital, alone. Betty’s still there with baby Gene, both of them recovering. Don, in rumpled pajamas, leans tiredly over the stove, idly preparing a skillet of corned beef hash. Around him, the kitchen is lit sparingly, the rest of the house dark. It’s like a mid-century modern spaceship.
Then eight-year-old Sally appears in the doorway. “I smelled something,” she says. She watches her father for a moment. “I didn’t know you could cook.” With hardly a word, Don divides the food onto two plates. Sally clambers up onto a bar stool. The final shot of the scene is father and daughter, eating side by side, two astronauts in an amber bubble.
Last night, as I went to bed, I found Squish still awake, struggling to fall asleep. She decided to read a few pages of A Swiftly Tilting Planet to break up the monotony of one of those kinds of nights when sleep just resists you. I told her how much I loved the middle-of-the-night scenes in that book, that they were my favorite parts.
“Yeah,” she said, “except they’re all stressed-out and waiting to see if they’re going to die, so.”
In Last Things, Jenny Offill writes about a mother and daughter who sleep all day in order to stay up all night, star-watching, and the daughter’s realization that starlight is a form of time travel, as is being awake when nobody else is:
Some of the starts were saw were bright and others were very faint. My mother said that some of the stars we were looking at no longer existed. We were seeing them as they’d appeared many years before. This was because it took light time to travel through space to us. It was as if you took a photograph of yourself and had someone walk all the way to China with it. By the time the person arrived, the picture wouldn’t look like you.
There’s nothing quite like that feeling. Yiyun Li describes it in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life like this:
I used to write from midnight to four o’clock. I had young children then, various jobs (from working with mice to working with cadaver tissue to teaching writing), and an ambition to keep writing separate from my real life. When most people were being ferried across the night by sleep, unaware of time, unaware of weather, I felt the luxury of living on the cusp of reality.
Night for those sound sleepers was a cocoon against time. For me, I wanted to believe, it was even better. Time, at night, was my possession, not the other way around.
It’s precisely what I love about L’Engle’s books. Some authors do a wonderful job of slipping food into their books; you read and start salivating. Others paint such vivid scenes that you’d swear you could walk right into them. In the Time books, L’Engle scoops out these little pleasant spaces where characters meet like ghosts, huddled over their worries or their small pleasures, and exist outside of the usual march of time.
In those little bubbles, the world is yours. Nobody else, it seems, is experiencing it. Just you. It isn’t true, of course. But it feels true, and that’s usually enough.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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