5/24/2023 0 Comments Prelude by Madeleine L'Engle![]() I'm not sure why I stopped to read this particular one, but I liked the French name in the title, and the imperative. ![]() ![]() I came across "Gilberte Must Play Bach" in one of those. There were dozens of boxes and binders, including ones with A Wrinkle in Time, The Arm of the Starfish, and A Wind in the Doorwritten on them, but I wasn't interested in the manuscripts of stories that could be read as real books: I was more curious about the scraps and stories and studies in the other boxes. The manuscripts I was poking about in were housed in repurposed ream boxes with words like "Eaton" and "Corrasable Bond" on the sides, and in black three-ring binders whose leather casings were beginning to crack. I'm not sure who christened it "the Tower," but the name was used ironically by both her and the rest of the family, an acknowledgment of the privilege of solitude and time. The Tower was just a room over the garage in the eighteenth-century New England farmhouse where she and my grandfather had lived and raised three children during the 1950s and where they still spent weekends, holidays, and long stretches of summer. ![]() I was about nine years old, curiously but quietly poking about my grandmother Madeleine L'Engle's manuscripts so as not to disturb her writing and risk losing the privilege of keeping her company in her "Ivory Tower" while she worked. ![]()
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