Here is a portion from the book Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle. She can be a little strange at times, but also brilliant, as in these two paragraphs.


Robert Lindner, author of Rebel Without a Cause, The 50 Minute Hour, etc. Concludes in Must We Conform? That society today shows all the clinical symptoms of psychosis. This isn’t the first time that a civilization has suffered from collective insanity, but one of the gravest dangers is the loss of the distinction between vision and delusion. Far too often today children are taught, both in school and at home, to equate truth with fact. If we can’t understand something and dissect it with our conscious minds then it isn’t true. In our anxiety to limit ourselves to that which we can comprehend definitively, we are losing all that is above, beyond, below, through, past, over that small area encompassed by our conscious minds.

The result of this artificial limitation is rebellion. The destructive rebellion is the most apparent—the alarming rise in the number of juvenile delinquents, the school dropouts, the continuing dependence on drugs. But there is also constructive rebellion on the part of our kids, as in their rediscovery of fairy tale, fantasy, myth; needle-work, and stained glass and ceramics; dancing and singing and baroque music; surely their passion for the Pachelbel canon is a passion for order in a disordered world. And they love the combination of order and delight in a Bach fugue.