“A Wind in the Door” is my longtime favorite of the Time series (and it shows). I doubt I’ll ever fully capture how I picture Progo, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out anyway.
Botober Day 15: Roaring Ball of Feathers #botober2021 When I visualized a roaring ball of feathers I was like oh that’s an angel and then I thought of my favorite angel, that singular cherubim Proginoskes from A Wind in the Door! https://www.instagram.com/p/CVG8nxdMebS/?utm_medium=tumblr
A Wind in the Door, Chapter 12 - A Wind in the Door
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In which I have far more questions than answers from this finale.
Sporos, now Deepened, asks the humans' forgiveness and sings the song of his people because the Echthroi can't stand it and should be driven away.
Mr. Jenkins has been caught by the Echthroi message and mindset, but Meg and Calvin mistake an Echthros-Jenkins for the real one. Reaching for it leaves Calvin in danger of being Xed, and it's Meg who stabilizes him, kything her sense of him strongly. Progo interrupts and tells her she may be the only one who can save the real Jenkins.
So, Meg tries to Kythe Mr. Jenkins, the real one. She, Calvin, and Progo are kything as hard as they can just to hold on. Meg asks some of the same questions she's been asking for several chapters once more,(1) knowing the answers and not wanting to believe them, until she has to believe them. She throws herself at the Echthroi, knowing it will hurt her again, and begs Calvin and Mr. Jenkins to help her fill the nothingness of the Echthroi with something.
A dramatic series of hopeless looking words trailing off into nothing later, Meg feels Progo Xing himself, giving of his whole self to fill and Name the Echthroi to help them.
Another, even longer interlude of a poem later,(2) Meg wakes with her arms around Charles, at home, with everyone including her father.(3) Calvin and Mr. Jenkins, the real one, came with her when she was transferred back. After confirming what Charles was saying in his delirium, that they were inside one of his mitochondria, the twins remain skeptical until Mr. Jenkins says he was there, too.
After Dr. Louise confirms that Charles should recover in a day or two, Meg asks Mr. Jenkins whether Charles's school life will continue as it was. He says, he can't interfere too much, Charles does have to learn to adapt for himself to some degree, but perhaps Mr. Jenkins isn't entirely without tools. He plans to upgrade the elementary school in some capacity.(4)
Sandy asks if anyone's hungry, and Charles says he'd like a turkey dinner. Mrs. Murry says she can manage steaks instead, and Dr. Louise says Charles can come downstairs when it's ready, but she suggests Meg and Calvin stay with Charles until then.
Once they're alone, Meg asks how they can have a feast without Progo. Calvin and Charles remind her that he Xed himself, but he was Named, so he wasn't really Xed.(5) Meg says humans having feelings really sucks sometimes. Charles reminds her that he didn't imagine his dragons,(6) and Meg manages a smile.
After supper, Charles is ordered back to bed immediately, but as he hugs Meg he suggests she and Calvin go out to the star watching rock again and look around. On the walk out, Calvin says it's a little strange to talk and not kythe, now. Meg replies that there are things they can't say around others, they'll still have to kythe sometimes. Calvin thinks perhaps they aren't supposed to talk about them often. They wonder where Blajeny is, and decide he's probably been sent to his next assignment already.
They make it to the star-watching rock, but nothing happens. Calvin says he knows somehow that Progo is alright. Meg says she knows too, but she wants her head to acknowledge it with her heart.(7)
As they're about to head back in, Louise comes out to bow at them, before slithering back into her wall.
Back at the house, they go inside, and the kitchen door blows open. Sandy and Dennys accuse them of being violent with the door, but Meg insists it blew open, even though Sandy says there's barely a breeze tonight.
Sandy got up and shut the door firmly. “You were gone long enough.”
“Did you count the stars or something?”
“We don’t have to count them,” Meg said. “They just need to be known by Name.”
Calvin’s eyes met hers for a long moment and held her gaze, not speaking, not kything, simply being.
Then she went up to Charles Wallace.(8)
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(1) I'm… far more tired reading this book than I expected to be, and for different reasons than I expected to be. I knew more or less how Wrinkle had aged, I reread it around when the movie came out, but the rest of the series I hadn't touched in at least 10 or 15 years. I know we established that Meg is stubborn in Wrinkle, but I didn't expect that she'd be quite this stubbornly resistant to answers she's heard multiple times before.
(2) No, I'm not trying to summarize either of those long bits, they're very straightforward imo.
(3) So, enough time passed this time that he could arrive home… but time was supposed to have passed slowly in farandola-scale. How did this pass editing muster?
(4) I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean, but perhaps it involves a curriculum that incorporates respect for our differences or something, given context, and not just… getting funding to repaint.
(5) This is very nearly the most confusing way to have vocabulary'd your concepts possible, and the least consistent logically speaking. But, it is at least consistent with the general Christian concept of the soul and death, and being consigned to Hell or Heaven.
(6) I know the public story of the band name is that they chose an anagram of another phrase, but it would amuse me at least a little to learn someday that Imagine Dragons was a reference to this book.
(7) Sometimes there's a big difference between knowing and feeling, I'm not sure I'd quite explain it this way but I get what the intention was.
(8) So, what do we feel like the takeaway is on this one? I think Wrinkle was very strongly themed around accepting yourself and finding the strengths in your flaws. I'm less sure about Wind. Perhaps it's because I'm coming at it from a particularly odd combination of culturally Christian/raised ex-Catholic experience, but it feels far more overwhelmingly and generically Christian in theme (all the way down to the one sacrificing himself for the many), while invoking so so many fewer of the explicit trappings of Christianity. In a way it feels to me more like a scifi Narnia book than a follow-up to Wrinkle. What do you think? Genuine open question to anyone actually reading these.
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In which "Oh, I know what we need to do!" gets a bit old after too many uses.
The song of the Deepened farandolae busts into the scene, and they can understand it. They sing of being in harmony with the stars and "the angelic host". Calvin asks how they can know about the stars, small as they are, and they don't understand how he can not understand being in harmony with everything. Calvin puts it down to humans only using some tiny percentage of their brains.(1)
They notice that Sporos is among a group of farandolae dancing menacingly around a fara-tree, Senex,(2) absorbing nutrients the tree needs. Progo even notices Yadah faltering, and Meg notices it too. She has a brief vision of the outside, of Charles faltering as well.(3) She asks if Senex could even be aware that Charles exists, if he could know that his host is ill. Progo says humans know the Milky Way exists, and that their Earth is sick by the animals dying and the war and chaos.
One of the Echthros-Jenkinses is telling the farandolae they don't need to Deepen. Meg tries to break their dance, to get Sporos's attention, but is thrown out violently. The real Mr. Jenkins says he understands, somewhat. At Meg's bafflement, he asks her why Hitler and Napoleon and Tiberius wanted to control the world. She doesn't know, and thinks their reasons were probably awful. He asks her if they did, and she says, they wanted to, but they failed. Mr. Jenkins says they succeeded for a while before they failed, though, and the farandolae are acting much like humans. Meg asks what Echthroi have to do with it, then, and Progo supplies that Echthroi are always behind war.(4)
After some more repeated fussing, Calvin manages to draw Sporos out of the dance. Sporos is selfish and wants to keep dancing. He says he doesn't need Charles, and when Calvin says of course Sporos needs the human host he's a part of to survive, Sporos ignores him and goes back to dancing.
More drama repeating the confrontation, this time with the Echthroi addressing the crew directly like a high school debate. Finally, Calvin realizes the trick they need: they must fill the vacuum of the Echthroi's void. Meg asks how, but Senex warns that if she doesn't understand, she may not want it strongly enough.
More repeat confrontation before Senex finally breaks through to Sporos, explaining how fara-trees can kythe anywhere in the universe once they Deepen, they aren't limited by physical motion.(5) The Echthros-Jenkins tries to re-convince Sporos to its side. Calvin bids Sporos to search inside himself, he knows it to be true that he needs to Deepen.(6) Back and forth, again and again, for several more pages.
Eventually, Meg throws herself into the circle and is lost to the currents of the dance. Mr. Jenkins is the one to pull her out, with his love for her, and she finds the dance broken after all.(7) The Echthros-Jenkinses make their own ring around him after she kythes to Calvin and Sporos, and Meg and Calvin and Progo plead with Sporos to Deepen and save him.
Sporos turned towards Senex, the fara from whom he had been born. He reached out small green tendrils towards all the farandolae. “It is Deepening time,” he said.(8)
Sporos and many of the other farandolae Deepen, and their song joins the other farae. Meg assumes that this has fixed everything, but Progo reminds her there were three tests. She turns back to Mr. Jenkins in the Echthroi-circle, and Progo says their third test must be to rescue him.(9)
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(1) NO NO NO I will not stand for this going unchallenged, we use almost all of our brains we just have dedicated pieces for most of the things we do. Moving your arm doesn't use most or any of the same neurons as thinking about what to say in a conversation. We don't have much in the way of meat we don't make use of, even the appendix seems to be a reservoir for gut bacteria or something, last time I looked into the research on it. Never, ever believe anyone who still, today, in 2024, says at all seriously that we don't use some part of our body or our brain. (I'm forgiving L'Engle for this only because this was written over fifty years ago.)
(2) Literally a generic old man. Bravo on the wordplay.
(3) What happened to "one heartbeat at human scale is ten years here"? The time shouldn't have elapsed yet to have all these visions.
(4) Y'know… I have a slight issue with the justification here, but only because it's part of a much larger pattern. How often do people, particularly Christians, try to blame evil deeds on some supernatural force, particularly the Devil or some concept related to it? Evil is as human as good is human. We are all capable of both, and some incomprehensible combination of our genes/neurochemistry and our upbringing and life experience shape which we're more likely to want to enact, if either. I don't like the idea of blaming evil on the supernatural but good on human choice. I think humans are inherently good at the group level, I think if we weren't we wouldn't have made community, made civilization, over and over again in different ways the world over… but I think blaming the supernatural for evil is taking away our agency and denying our responsibility to choose to be kind and to teach kindness to each other, as a species.
(5) All of this starts to fall apart again when we remember that just a few chapters ago we had several repeat warnings that motion and distance are meaningless here but sure.
(6) I'm not above making a reference of my own.
(7) One of these days I've gotta do some Tam Lin lore diving to be able to better comment on this sort of situation, because currently my primary source of comparison is the October Daye books by Seanan McGuire, and while they're good and I love them, I don't trust them to be my only reliable source on a tale that's been told so many times. Still, I see parallels, I see invocation of themes, I just don't have the basis to actually comment on them more than this.
(8) I'm sure this was meant to be very earnest, very sweet, very serious… but time has not been kind to this sentence structure in the pop culture department.
(9) I'm a little tired of "oh, this task we're present for must be our next test" being the go-to here, y'know?
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In which the repetition reaches record repeats.
Mr. Jenkins is struggling to accept the group's current position in the universe, and his kything is all muddy. Meg tells him one of his imposters is nearby, and his response is tenderness as he tells her she shouldn't have to endure this. She also tells him about the farandolae that sacrificed themselves to save them from the Echthroi. Progo, through Meg, reassures Mr. Jenkins that they Xed themselves so they're still part of Creation. When Meg asks, though, Progo says he doesn't know if that means they're still gone forever.(1)
Meg and Progo then have to explain again what a farandola is, because Mr. Jenkins refuses to accept their existence.(2) He's not the sort of man who goes for walks in the woods, so he can't grasp Meg's explanation that it feels like trees talk to each other.(3) Calvin kythes Meg a memory of a walk they took in the woods, and Meg realizes that Mr. Jenkins has never had that sort of communion with another person before.
Calvin tells Meg about a Wall Street Journal article he thinks will help Mr. Jenkins to accept all this, since he knows the man reads it regularly. Calvin was 9, and an avid reader of anything he could get his hands on. He helped an old lady in the village to clear out her attic, and his payment was a set of china. It wasn't particularly valuable, but it was wrapped carefully in an edition of the WSJ. The article that caught his eye was about plants reacting to stimuli and measuring their reactions with electrodes.(4)
Mr. Jenkins read that piece, but thought it was a crackpot idea. Calvin and Meg remind him that lots of great discoveries were treated the same at first. Calvin recalls another article about a plant at home reacting every time its owner's plane took off or landed.
So, needing a science fair project, Calvin decided to plant three beans and treat them differently. Mr. Jenkins is dismissive, but Meg reminds him Calvin was only nine. One, he left at home, where it heard his family's rude speech and wasn't cared for. The other two, he got permission to keep at the library. He watered one dutifully, but the last, he spoke to and encouraged. The first was weak, the second grew normally, and the last flourished.
Mr. Jenkins is still a little skeptical, but says, if plants can react like that, then he's supposed to understand what farandolae do? If they're loved they grow, and if not… then, Sporos finally reappears to say, the Echthroi can move in.
Progo says he knows what the second test is, now: to Name Sporos. Mr. Jenkins protests that Sporos already has a Name, but Progo says, it's not really set until he Deepens, and becomes an adult of his species. He has to explain to Mr. Jenkins once again about the life cycle of the farandolae, but at last, he agrees that they must save Sporos, to save Charles Wallace, and prevent evil from taking root in the world. So, what do they do about it?(5)
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(1) Do you think this is the sort of universe with some sort of reincarnation system, or is it more the Christian kingdom-of-heaven-after-death sort? I think L'Engle would've leaned toward the latter.
(2) Frankly, he should, because they're not real. Nothing physical and conscious the way we understand it can exist at that scale. But, narrative conceits, fine fine, on with it then.
(3) This was written before mycelial networking really became a mainstream science knowledge thing. There were observations of carbon transfer through it as far back as 1969 at least, but it's the last ~15 years that it's really taken off in the literature, for the good (knowledge) and the bad (overhyping, exaggerating the meaning of results). Still, it's neat to see a hint toward it here in 1973.
(4) We now know some plants can go so far as to mimic the leaf shape and colour of other plants around them reliably so, yeah, I'd say they react to things.
(5) I'd be feeling more charitable if this didn't just feel like a repeat of like, at least three other chapters we've already read in this very book, right down to the "ok so what do we DO" at the end.
