A Severed Wasp by L'Engle and the Questions I Found

I finished re-reading 

L'Engle's A Severed Wasp.

It was a suspenseful ending; an ending that held but

that that left me with a lot of unanswered questions. 

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First, you must realize where the title is from, 

and that the book makes clear mention of:

“I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man, and there was a period -- twenty years, perhaps -- during which he did not notice it.  

It was absolutely necessary that the soul be cut away.  Religious belief, in the form that we had known it, had to be abandoned." 

—"Notes On The Way", George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters. Volume Two, ISBN 1-56792-134-5

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Thankfully I found more of this online here.

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I have a lot more to think on this,

and I am wondering if in part,

esp. if L'Engle thinks this quotation to be true,

if she got it wrong.

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I will try to get back to that.

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Meanwhile,

and by the way I will be discussing this book in depth so if you need

a 'spoiler warning' this is it,

I am thinking of the main character Katherine, who is now

a newly retired pianist who still is in her prime 

in terms of performance and is well loved.

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She is going over her life and the people she knew,

most of them all passed on to what the next life is and she,

still living is sorting her life out.

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By the time L'Engle wrote this book she was already

going towards doing this for herself.

Her husband was still alive but

she is already writing characters who 

are living after the death of their husbands 

and she herself uses her lines from this book to describe

the loss of her husband in 1986.

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You see L'Engle tying up a lot of loose ends in this book;

various characters, from other L'Engle books, grow up, have families, 

and L'Engle's first character from her first book,

The Small Rain meets a bunch of them in

A Severed Wasp.

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When I first read this book, I was at TWU

and it was between 1999-2001, so about at least 14 years or so ago.

I was then 21-24  years of age, depending on what year I read it.... 

I was a young woman, still figuring a lot out,

I had lost a woman who was like my spiritual mother,

I was trying to figure out the mess the world had made, 

especially in academia, of gender and gender roles and I was reading 

many books to try to figure things out.

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From what I remember of reading this book the first time,

and reading her Small Rain as well,

was that I could relate more to the characters lives when

they were young.

L'Engle has Katherine narrate how when she was young

she still needed a lot of mothering and fathering,

even into her twenties.

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I know in my twenties I felt a lot of that need still as well,

though I can't say my parents were at all inept and I can say today

that my Mother is one of my closest friends and my Father

one of my trusted advisers in my life. 

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I am just under 2 years from 40, 

whatever that means,

and I am sure sometime I will see how 'young' I still am.

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But I have, I see, done some growing up in the last years.

They say marrying will do that.

Lots of learning in marriage, 

including standing and walking on one's own two feet.

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Fr. John of the book Everyday Saints 

is very clear about how spiritual children need to learn

to stand on their own two feet and a spiritual father is not

one to carry one as much as to point one in the right direction.

See this lovely article about him, I highly recommend it.

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Life is never just one thing but a juxtaposition of many things as well.

I realize that I relate to the character Katherine also in what

some expected of her and what she had to define boundaries about

who she is and is not.

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When I was not even in my twenties I was going to a Mother-Daughter banquet 

in place of a Mother who had died.

Katherine in this book is often asked by the words and/or actions of others

to be more than she is (a person's Mother or Confessor for instance) 

and she has to firmly put the others

back in their place so that they can come to themselves and 

make the choices they alone can make.

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I am pondering this a lot lately.

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I really liked the line by the retired Bishop Felix who said when he was young

he was lonely and trying to get past this feeling,

had not realized that everyone deals with loneliness and that when he was 

younger he did not yet know this;

I think this is actually quite freeing.

Somehow Bishop Felix describes 'getting over himself' here.

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I am pondering the fact of the sadness in this world

and that many are in need of help and I can't help them or 

in anyway save them from their situation or the consequences of choices.

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And I have a lot of new questions from this book...and thinking on

many things in my life related to it... 

What does it mean to grow up?

What is friendship? What is balance in life and in friendship? What about the many times

that by circumstances one cannot be balanced?

Can their be friendship that is vulnerable about one's struggle

without the need of the other to solve this struggle?

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For even though Katharine puts up boundaries, she ends up

healing a lot of people and solving huge problems that

really were not hers at all.

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What does it mean to grow up

and does one ever not need one's Mother?

When one is old and is the Grandmother like Katherine in this book is,

is it only pain that leads one to maturing so that one

is suddenly the one that others look to?

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Anyway, questions from this book.

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I hope to get back to the other theme I mentioned, 

there are so many in this book,

but I understand a bit more about history and what the characters

who lived through World War II were trying to 

come to terms with

and Orwell's quotation is very important and enlightening in all of this.