“Is that what my father is fighting?”

Did a shadow fall across the moon or did the moon simply go out, extinguished as a abruptly and completely as a candle? There was still the sound of leaves, a terrified, terrifying rushing. All light was gone. Darkness was complete. Suddenly the wind was gone, and all sound. Meg felt that Calvin was being torn from her. When she reached for him her fingers touched nothing.

She screamed out, “Charles!” and whether it was to help him or for him to help her, she did not know. The word was flung back down her throat and she choked on it.

She was completely alone.

She had lost the protection of Calvin’s hand. Charles was nowhere, either to save or to turn to. She was alone in a fragment of nothingness. No light, no sound, no feeling. Where was her body? She tried to move in her panic, but there was nothing to move. Just as light and sound had vanished, she was gone, too. The corporeal Meg simply was not.

I literally started with the second paragraph here – it’s really that sudden. She just doesn’t exist, and it is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read.

Then she felt her limbs again. Her legs and arms were tingling faintly, as though they had been asleep. She blinked her eyes rapidly, but though she herself was somehow back, nothing else was. It was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light. Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you. She was lost in a horrifying void.

It was the same way with the silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

[…]

I am asleep; I am dreaming, she thought. I’m having a nightmare. I want to wake up. Let me wake up.

But of course, nothingness is never something you dream about; if you’re dreaming, you’ll fill your dreams with something. She’s just having a nightmarish experience!

She saw Charles, she heard him, but she could not go to him. She could not shove through the strange, trembling light to meet him.

Calvin’s voice came as though it were pushing through a cloud. “Well, just give me time, will you? I’m older than you are.”

Meg gasped. It wasn’t that Calvin wasn’t there and then he was. It wasn’t that part of him came first and then the rest of him followed, like a hand and then an arm, an eye and then a nose. It was a sort of shimmering, a looking at Calvin through water, through smoke, through fire, and then there he was, solid and reassuring.

“Meg!” Charles Wallace’s voice came. “Meg! Calvin, where’s Meg?”

“I’m right here,” she tried to say, but her voice seemed to be caught at its source.

It seems that the experience of teleportation was different for the three of them – Charles was merely caught off guard by the suddenness, while Calvin was surprised but seemingly took it in stride, and poor Meg didn’t have a clue what was happening.

They had left the silver glint of a biting autumn evening; and now around them everything was golden with light. The grasses of the field were a tender new green, and scattered about were tiny, multicolored flowers, Meg turned slowly to face a mountain reaching so high into the sky that its peak was lost in a crown of puffy white clouds. From the trees at the base of the mountain came a sudden singing of birds. There was an air of such ineffable peace and joy all around her that her heart’s wild thumping slowed.

"When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning, or in rain,"

came Mrs Who’s voice. Suddenly the three of them were there, Mrs Whatsit with her pink stole askew; Mrs Who with her spectacles gleaming; and Mrs Which still little more than a shimmer. Delicate, multicolored butterflies were fluttering about them, as though in greeting.

This line is one of the few that Mrs Who fails to cite, from Macbeth, and the following line goes on to say “when the battle’s lost and won”.

Mrs Which finally materializes in a tall, classical witch shape, complete with a peaked hat and a broomstick. But then Charles proceeds to chide them for scaring Meg so much.

“Finxerunt animi, raro et perpauca loquentis,” Mrs Who intoned. “Horace. To action little, less to words inclined.“

“Mrs Who, I wish you’d stop quoting!” Charles Wallace sounded very annoyed.

Mrs Whatsit adjusted her stole. “But she finds it so difficult to verbalize, Charles dear. It helps if she can quote instead of working out words of her own.”

This is one of the first things you learn about linguistics: There are so many rules just in a single language regarding how to form sentences, and countless variations one can employ. Even limiting herself to words that have been said before, Mrs Who has a vast range of choices…even if it’s obviously skewed toward classical European language. I can’t blame L’Engle for portraying a more infinite character with her own limited human background.

“Where are we now, and how did we get here?” Calvin asked.

“Uriel, the third planet of the star Malak in the spiral nebula Messier 101.”

“This I’m supposed to believe?” Calvin asked indignantly.

“Aas yyou llike,” Mrs Which said coldly.

For some reason Meg felt that Mrs Which, despite her looks and ephemeral broomstick, was someone in whom one could put complete trust. “It doesn’t seem any more peculiar than anything else that’s happened.”

[…]

“Oh, we don’t travel by the speed of anything,” Mrs Whatsit explained earnestly. “We tesser. Or you might say, we wrinkle.”

“Clear as mud,” Calvin said.

While Meg wonders if “tesser” has something to do with the “tesseract”, she’s distracted by the more pressing question of what all this has to do with her father.

Mrs Whatsit explains that this is basically a pitstop, partly intended to accustom the kids to this form of travel and partly to give them a sense of what they’re up against. Notably, both “Malak” and “Uriel” are names of archangels in Judeo-Christian literature.

Then Mrs Which tells Mrs Whatsit to “change” in order to show the children something…

“Now, don’t be frightened, loves,” Mrs Whatsit said. Her plump body began to shimmer, to quiver, to shift. The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than outward description. Outwardly Mrs Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs Whatsit. She was a marble white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen. No, she thought, it’s not like a Greek centaur. Not in the least.

From the shoulders slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry.

Calvin fell to his knees.

“No,” Mrs Whatsit said, though her voice was not Mrs Whatsit’s voice. “Not to me, Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.“

This is a clear allusion to one of the common responses humans have in the Bible when encountering an angel – the inclination to worship them.

And this also represents one of my biggest issues with the most recent film adaptation: The Mrs W’s are far too pretty in their earthly forms. And rather than a centaur-esque form, Mrs Whatsit turns into some sort of lettuce dragon. Basically, there’s no awe when they transform into other forms, it’s just weird.

“But what do we call you now?” Calvin asked.

“Oh, my dears,” came the new voice, a rich voice with the warmth of a woodwind, the clarity of a trumpet, the mystery of an English horn. “You can’t go on changing my name each time I metamorphose. And I’ve had such pleasure being Mrs Whatsit I think you’d better keep to that.” She? he? it? smiled at them, and the radiance of the smile was as tangible as a soft breeze, as directly warming as the rays of the sun.

What with the direct attention paid to names and pronouns (and the fairly progressive spirituality she espoused), I personally think if she’d written this in the current age, she’d opt for “they” to refer to the Mrs W’s (the singular they didn’t really catch on until at least the 90’s). They’re clearly meant to represent angels, which according to the Bible, don’t have biological sex/gender. But the book continues to refer to them with feminine pronouns, so I’ll mostly stick with that.

Anyhow, the kids ride on Mrs Whatsit’s back, flying high in the sky, and even somewhat above the atmosphere, taking in the sights of the planet.

“I want to watch the moon set,” Charles Wallace said.

“No, child. Do not turn around, any of you. Face out toward the dark. What I have to show you will be more visible then. Look ahead, straight ahead, as far as you can possibly look.”

[…]

“The atmosphere is so thin here,” Mrs Whatsit said as though in answer to [Meg’s] unasked question, “that it does not obscure your vision as it would at home. Now look. Look straight ahead.”

Meg looked. The dark shadow was still there. It had not lessened or dispersed with the coming of night. And where the shadow was the stars were not visible.

What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that she knew that there had never been before or ever would be again, anything that would chill her with a fear that was beyond shuddering, beyond crying or screaming, beyond the possibility of comfort?

[…]

The shadow was still there, dark and dreadful.

Calvin held her hand strongly in his, but she felt neither strength nor reassurance in his touch. Beside her a tremor went through Charles Wallace, but he sat very still.

He shouldn’t be seeing this, Meg thought. This is too much for such a little boy, no matter how different and extraordinary a little boy.

Calvin turned, rejecting the dark Thing that blotted out the light of the stars. “Make it go away, Mrs Whatsit,” he whispered. “Make it go away. It’s evil.”

It’s difficult to make an abstract concept like “evil” seem threatening, and I think L’Engle only partly succeeds in this chapter.

“That dark Thing we saw,” [Meg] said. “Is that what my father is fighting?”

Until next time…