Free Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? by Madeleine L'Engle Page A

that any book which mentions witches or ghosts is evil and must be banned. If these people were consistent, they would have to ban the Bible: what about the Witch of Endor and Samuel’s ghost?
    The woman’s epistle went on to say that Charles Wallace knew things that other people didn’t know. “So did Jesus,” I scrawled in the margin. She was upset because Calvin sometimes felt compulsions. Don’t we all? This woman obviously felt a compulsion to be a censor. Finally I scrawled at the bottom of the epistle that I truly feared for this woman. We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.
    On the other side of the censoring coin, there was an uproar in another midwestern city about the removal from the shelves of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever because the word Christmas is in the title. Do we have the right to impose our own religious beliefs, from no matter which direction they come, on the rest of the world? I don’t think so.
    Someone sent me a clipping from a daily newspaper containing a list of ten books to be removed from library shelves because of their pornographic content. On the list was one of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Also on the list was my book A Wind in the Door. I am totally baffled and frankly fascinated. This is the first time C. S. Lewis and I have been listed together as writers of pornography. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
    We all practice some form of censorship. I practiced it simply by the books I had in the house when my children were little. If I am given a budget of $500 I will be practicing a form of censorship by the books I choose to buy with that limited amount of money, and the books I choose not to buy. But nobody said we were not allowed to have points of view. The exercise of personal taste is not the same thing as imposing personal opinion.
    When my girls were in junior high school, Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group was circulating, underground, among the students. It is a book I happen not to like, though I very much admire some of her other books. I read it because I knew the girls were going to read it, whether I permitted it or not, and I preferred reading it with them, and discussing it, to having them reading it subversively, behind my back, and perhaps being confused by it. The second chapter is a blow-by-blow account of the sexual act, and I remarked that when something so private is described so publicly it loses any possibility of being about love. To my delight—and rather to my surprise—I heard my younger daughter, on the phone to her best friend, parroting my words as though they were her own. And surely that was healthier, having it out in the open, than keeping it under cover. There’s no easy solution. There were books I didn’t want my children to read, at least until they were older. Thoughtless permissiveness is somewhat like offering a dry martini to a two-year-old or giving a sports car to a four-year-old.
    As a writer, I have to accept that books that are marketed as Young Adult Novels are going also to be read by the ten-year-olds. But I, too, read avidly when I was ten. I read every book I could get my hands on, suitable or unsuitable. However, when I was ten I simply skipped over the parts of the books which were not within the context of my own life. The dubious sections of novels did not hurt me because I did not understand them and skipped over them, just as I skipped over the sermonizing in some Victorian novels in order to get on with the story.
    And the stories I cared about, the stories I read and reread, were usually stories which dared to disturb the universe, which asked questions rather than gave answers.
    I turned to story, then as now, looking for truth, for it is in story that we find glimpses of meaning,