Madeline L’Engle’s 3 for 3

What’s the strangest secret about being a book reviewer? You spend most of your time looking at books you will never review.

This year, a friend asked my advice about entering the field. Based on my three years as a magazine book reviewer, I shared my much needed shortcut for choosing which books to cull from a pile of submissions.

“Read the first page,” I advised, “because it will tell you so much about the writer’s message, where the book is aimed, the ability to convey that message, and the writer’s overall skill. Check out the jacket and interior design, tip-offs to professionalism.

“Then go back to the writer’s first page and use your intuitive abilities to learn about the author’s motivation in writing the book. Is it all about “I want to be a writer and have a book” or do you find something more worthwhile?

“But the most important thing to do as a reviewer, if possible, is to find the author’s photo on the cover or inside. Read that to learn if that author has the standing to write about the topic of that book.”

What do I mean by standing? If you write about consciousness, have consciousness. If you write a cookbook, don’t be anorexic. If you’re a historian, show an intellect with some pizzazz, so the version of history that you describe won’t just be “one damned thing after another.”

MADELINE L’ENGLE’S STANDING

For today’s reading, our Fourth Day of Christmas, let me show you how I would have checked out novelist Madeline L’Engle if I’d been asked to review her masterpiece, “A Wrinkle in Time.” What does her face show? Of course, I’ll use my system of Face Reading Secrets (R).

You can use it, too, or any physiognomy system you like. Click here for a version of the photo that you can expand by copying it onto a blank page and pulling the corners. Then post your observations as comments.

Far-Set Eyes

The distance between the author’s eyes is wider than one of her eyes.

For a writer of visionary fiction, you couldn’t ask for more. The data corresponds to a talent for thinking with an ultra-broad perspective.

Potential challenge? Will people consider her impractical? Hey, in a writer’s professional life, this could be a plus.

Enormous Eyebrow Range

Note the sweep in brow height, all contained in one high-flying shape.

Thinking encompasses an enormous emotional range.

Potential challenge? Living with somebody who has this gift may be quite the roller coaster. Depending on other characteristics of the person’s face and aura, there could be diva potential or even a full-blown histrionic personality disorder. Regarding the late, great novelist, suffice it to say that I don’t think she had this challenge.

To read our final face item of this series, we’ll need a second photograph. This one!

It shows L’Engle’s eyebrows in repose, in contrast to her lifted brows in the more expressive photo that we’ve been viewing before.

Exceptional Eyebrow Mobility

In repose, those brows sure have settled down, haven’t they?

Eyebrows in repose reveal ordinary thinking patterns, with so many categories involved that you’ll find an entire chapter devoted to them in The Power of Face Reading. 

Lifted eyebrows disclose something more private and personal. How does that person think inwardly?

Have you ever seen a bigger contrast between the two versions of eyebrow shape? Outwardly sane, inwardly wild: That is the meaning.

Beyond that, Madeline’s vast eyebrow range informs us that she understood linear thinking. Yet her thinking could also be exceptionally far out. She didn’t merely understand this contrast theoretically but lived it. This intellectual range helped her to communicate with a wide range of readers.

If you’re counting face data related to exceptional talent for just her kind of fiction, Madeline L’Engle is now three for three.

Potential challenge? For someone less self-actualized, there could be a Walter Mitty-like frustration in life, where her relatively placid, black-and-white exterior never sufficiently expresses the wild Technicolor artist within. But with an opus like L’Engle’s, no worries!

BEST OF ALL

Finally, let’s take one quick peek deeper, doing a fast empathic merge with Madeline L’Engle third eye databank about “The spiritual basis for creativity.” Here’s what I find, using the Darshan technique from Empowered by Empathy. 

L’Engle really does move, in her consciousness, beyond the planet, higher than our immediate heavens, all the way out past the solar system.

She really is linked to intelligence feed-throughs for higher dimensions, and incarnated in part to bring those frequencies into earth.

Writing was her chosen method. But the consciousness she expressed couldn’t be taught in a writer’s workshop. The closest you’d come to a class might be astrophysics.

Living with such an expanded consciousness was not always easy for her, and traces of her HUMAN struggles show in this databank. But L’Engle did learn to compartmentalize and, thank God, to write. So joining experientially with this part of her, you will learn about triumph.

Did you know the meaning of her oh-so-appropriate last name. It’s German. It’s “angel.”