Perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief…that total knowledge is possible, that all that is potential can exist as actual. This is not man’s fate, this is not his path, to force him on it makes him resemble not that divine image of the all-knowing and all-powerful, but the helpless iron bound prisoner of a dying world. (J. Robert Oppenheimer)
Being consulted as to whether the child [Narcissus] would live a long life, to a ripe old age, the seer with prophetic vision replied, “If he does not discover himself.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses)
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire. (T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”)
The first book I ever bought for myself was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door. I was ten years old and I bought it with my own money at the Books-A-Million store in Jackson, Mississippi. A Wind in the Door (1973) is the sequel to L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time (1962), of which we had an old, dog-eared copy that I must have read a dozen times before the day I walked into that B-A-M store. A Wrinkle in Time had all the right ingredients for my literary taste at that age: danger and adventure with stakes of cosmic magnitude; a proper amount of comic relief, neither too much nor too little; that admixture of religion, science, and magic peculiar to fantasy fiction; clearly delineated good and evil; and, above all, the tangible sense of conflict in the story between the world of the children and the world of the adults.
From its opening sentence, “There are dragons in the twins’ vegetable garden,” I knew that A Wind in the Door would live up to the expectations set by its prequel. As clear in my mind as if the memory was from yesterday, and not twenty years deep into the past, is the “reading corner” at the bookstore, the yellow, vinyl-slipcovered armchair I sat in with the book, the feeling of that book, my book, in my hands, and the sensation of slip-sliding-away into the story of Charles Wallace Murry, his sister Meg, the cherubim (not dragons) in their garden, the mysterious, almost-inconceivable world of mitochondria (real) and farandolae (mythic), and the malevolent power of the Echthroi. Clear, too, in my memory, is my mother’s voice, breaking through the reverie of the book, telling me it is time to go home.
Home is where the heart is in A Wind in the Door. The location of the book’s main act is the world of mitochondria and farandolae: the host of that world is Charles Wallace Murry and, being but a child, his world is his home. Now, that main act revolves around a challenge: Meg and her companions must convince a young farandola, Sporos, to “Deepen.” To “Deepen,” explains the cherubim, means the fara “comes of age.”
It means he grows up. The temptation for farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we make our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center.
Sporos, unsurprisingly, is not sold on the prospect of maturation—or at least on the the traditional conception thereof. To mature is to grow and to grow means putting down roots. Sporos is insistent that this process of maturation is static, stunting, uninspiring, whereas real maturation is dynamic. From this point of view, in order for maturation to be proper and dignified, it must be the free choice of the individual—my election to stand alone, apart, and prove my own mettle. Otherwise, my “deepening” will attain for me not maturity, but conformity. As with any lie, a thread of truth runs through this misbegotten view. And the Echtroi—the tempters—attempt to entwine Sporos and his compatriots with this thread and tug them into deception and self-destruction. “Once you Deepen and put down roots,” they say, “you’ll be stuck in one place forever…you won’t be able to run or move, ever again.”
Hence the song and dance of the faranadolae, led by Sporos: with it they encircle their parents and drain from them their energy, their will to live, and take these for themselves. “We don’t need to deepen. That’s only an old superstition. It is a stupid song they sing, all this Glory, glory, glory. We are the ones who are glorious.” And the fight is on. (To know how it ends—if you do not already—I must trust you to read the book for yourself, or for your children to read it and inform you.)
For years now (perhaps not since I first read the book, as that would be giving my ten-year-old self way too much credit), but for years now, I have thought of this challenge of “Deepening” in A Wind in the Door as the perfect representation of the spirit of the age. And what is that spirit? Self-absorption and self-glorification to the point of spiritual parricide. The Romans called devotion to parents, to country, to the past: pietas. This spirit is the anti-pietas. It empowers us to confront those who made us and take from them without counting the cost, all in the pursuit of our own self-realization.
In turn, I have thought of this spirit as a narcissistic spirit. The temptation of Sporos, and the seemingly ineluctable tendency of we who live to see such times, is Narcissistic in nature. We are primed to be “immature pleasure-seekers,” bent in mind and body after “our own pleasure as the ultimate,” and thereby do we set ourselves at the center of the universe. This consideration has been confirmed in my mind—albeit partially and somewhat darkly—as I have been reading through Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979). Given that it was published just six years after A Wind in the Door, I had expected Lasch’s work to mirror the drama of L’Engle’s novel, especially in the “Deepening” scene and the themes which it explores, insofar as psychological, sociological, and historical analyses can be a mirror. And to a certain extent, it does. In the Preface to his diagnosis of “American life in an age of diminishing expectations,” Lasch writes:
The narcissist has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past. He finds it difficult to internalize happy associations or to create a store of loving memories with which to face the latter part of his life, which under the best of circumstances always brings sadness and pain. In a narcissistic society—a society that gives increasing prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits—the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of the prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist’s inner life.
In this description, I also see myself: a fallen creature, dust unto dust, “wounded in [my] natural powers…subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin.” Take that, and add the singular habits of mind inherited from the society and culture in which I live, move, and eat my beans, and you get a fairly steep incline toward that “impoverishment of inner life.” Yet I also can see Sporos in that description. And this strikes me as peculiar. Because I do not see myself in Sporos. I did not seem myself in him when I was ten, absorbed for the first time in the novel, I did not see myself in him a decade later, on summer vacation, absorbed once again in the novel; and I did not see myself in him just now, yet another decade later, reading one more time the drama of “Deepening.” Why is that? How is that? How can this fictional creature of twentieth-century twilight and I, who have lived all but my childhood years under the light of a new century’s sun, be so similar and yet so different?
The difference is a practical one. And it is a practical difference which makes, in my mind, the difficulty of the current bout of narcissism more pronounced and more pervasive than that of the previous bout. That difference is this: the spirit of our age is Narcissistic in word and in deed; the spirit of the former age was Narcissistic in spirit, but Promethean in practice.
A Wind in the Door figures as one the last of the Promethean tales. The myth of Prometheus, as William Lynch describes in Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular (another book, as it happens, from the Seventies), with “the most fundamental of all the questions that have plagued the relation between the sacred and the secular.”
Can man have his own free movement and life according to his own resources and with his own ends, in any kind of independence of religion, God, the sacred?
That term free movement should immediately recall the “Deepening” act of A Wind in the Door. What do Sporos and his fellows resist? The loss of their ability to move about freely, to determine for themselves their life’s direction, to be altogether free of those fetters which their elders foolishly call “the ties that bind.” Paying no heed to the prophetic warning about the perils of self-discovery, Sporos and his companions turn their focus inward to determine who they are and want they want. Armed with that self-discovery, they then turn to the external world and seek to subordinate it to themselves, even if the price of doing so is the destruction of the very thing they seek to possess. In a word, they comprehend reality as Narcissists, but they confront it as Prometheans.
And lest we think that this is confined to worlds of the imagination and destinies of mythical creatures, here is Lynch again:
This has remained an abiding question in theology. In our own day it has again become a central question of our own contemporary theologizing. Has man come alive? Is God dead? The same question of autonomous action is debated at the very center of the soul of the modern artist as he seeks freedom from “reality.” All in all the question has never been more intensely asked than in our own time.
But that was then; this is now. Now—perhaps even then (to judge from Lasch’s account)—the question is no longer being asked. It has been summarily answered. Recall Lasch: the prevailing ideologies of a narcissistic society lose their grip on reality and abandon the attempt to master it. And as the society goes, so goes the individual; leaning upon Émile Durkheim, the founder of sociology, Lasch continues: “Every society reproduces its culture…in the individual, in the form of personality. As Durkheim said, personality is the individual socialized.” In other words, the members of such an out-and-out narcissistic culture lose their Prometheus-like willingness to confront reality and take what they need to live, to survive, to thrive, from it. Bereft of that inclination, they list to and fro among life’s myriad options, standing rootless in the desert.
What fire is to Prometheus, water is to Narcissus. In Ovid’s telling, Narcissus spies “an unclouded fountain, with silver-bright water,” before which he throws himself and slakes his thirst. While he drinks, he is captured by the sight of his own reflection. He exclaims:
Fool, why try to catch a fleeting image, in vain? What you search for is nowhere: turning away, what you love is lost! What you perceive is the shadow of reflected form: nothing of you is in it. It comes and stays with you, and leaves with you, if you can leave! …
I am he. I sense it and I am not deceived by my own image. I am burning with love for myself. I move and bear the flames.… What I want I have. My riches make me poor.… I desire what I love to be distant from me. Now sadness takes away my strength, not much time is left for me to live, and I am cut off in the prime of youth. Nor is dying painful to me, laying down my sadness in death. I wish that him I love might live on, but now we shall die united, two in one spirit.”
As the account of Narcissus draws to a close, Ovid brings together the two elements of fire and water to create the final image of the myth. It is an observation on the nature of love, obviously; but it also functions as a comment on the effect that your place—where you have rooted yourself, in other words—has on your love and your life. Narcissus has set himself down by the water and the water washes against the fire of his love, quenching it.
He spoke, and returned madly to the same reflection, and his tears stirred the water, and the image became obscured in the rippling pool.… As he sees all this reflected in the dissolving waves, he can bear it no longer, but as yellow wax melts in a light flame, as morning frost thaws in the sun, so he is weakened and melted by love, and worn away little by little by the hidden fire.
I called A Wind in the Door the last of the Promethean tales. In the novel, the character who precipitates the whole adventure is the “dragons in the twins’ vegetable garden” from the first line of the book: a cherubim named Proginoskes. L’Engle describes him as “wings, wings in constant motion, covering and uncovering the eyes… Little spurts of flame and smoke spouted up between the wings.” This form is meant to impart confidence to those who behold him. “I find him simpler”—the mysterious “Teacher” confides to Meg—“when he’s just a wind or a flame, but he was convinced he’d be more reassuring to earthlings if he enfleshed himself.”
This prime placement in the story of a cherubim, an angel of wind and fire, is by no means incidental. Cherubim are the angels of fire; fire is the power Prometheus wrests from the grasp of the gods—the power to build worlds and the power to destroy them. The placement and performance of Proginoskes, the angel of fire, is in perfect keeping with the very nature of the book. In fact, it gives the book its particular flair. A Wind in the Door is (for lack of a better phrase) a coming-of-age story. Coming of age means maturation and maturation means capacities which once were potential can now be actual. With those actual capacities comes the choice to use them either responsibly or negligently, for building worlds or for tearing them down. Proginoskes stands as the keeper of the flame of God, the reminder that power comes from above, and is to be wielded in deference to the divine dictates. He also signals against the trap, discreetly hidden in those heady days of first discovery, of newfound power or knowledge: the deceit that there are no limits or boundaries, that “all that is potential can exist as actual” (Oppenheimer).
As Sporos proves, narcissism easily indulges this deception. This deceit serves only to empower self-destruction. It answers with a resounding yes to the question of life on my own terms: to move freely about the cabin of existence; to devise life according to my own means and ends; and to gain my independence outright from God, the transcendent, the sacred. Why, or how, does the deception find such a ready listener in Sporos? Sporos is willing to put his hand to the divine fire because he knows he has the power to actually seize the flame. And so do we. Made after God’s very likeness, we bear within us the divine spark. We can bear it nobly in the service of its Giver; we can wield it to our ends, to tragic, devastating effect; or we can choose simply to stifle it, leaving our legacy to a sterile fate.
The last is the narcissist’s choice. My destruction, like my “impoverished inner line,” is accomplished without the hot rush of wind and fire. My yes becomes the means of escape from myself. This escape, however, effectively constitutes a collapse inward upon that very same self, and I become “but the helpless iron bound prisoner of a dying world.” What is more, this collapse defies any comparison to dying stars. There is no blaze of light and heat in this collapse; there is no wind and flame, no glory, glory, glory, no fire. There is no fire because the self neither acknowledges nor attends to any god, let alone God, from whom he might wrest that fire. Abandoning God, there is only me, myself, and my reflection of me. That is the collapse of the narcissist and his culture—and even the “permanent Promethean streak in our self-image” is powerless to prevent it. After fire and water comes dust. And this is the death of water and fire.
Credit: Caravaggio, Narcissus (c. 1597–1599), via Wikimedia Commons.