What makes your waters muddy – a word that here means addling, discombobulating, befuddling, bewildering?
For me, the most glaring example is my vision, which is simply terrible. That’s one reason I’ve always loved my glasses. They bring clarity to the confused, muddy mess of my sight. Glasses clarify your powers, too–or at least they do in “A Wrinkle in Time,” what might have been my first real book obsession. Along her other supposed faults, the main character Meg uses glasses allow her to rescue her father from an opaque, impenetrable alien prison cell.
So I must have been super cool when I rocked my big pink plastic frames in middle school, right?
Lately I’m still reading through plastic frames, but these days my obsession is Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. And as life’s problems have gotten less cut and dry than they were back then, so too has my reading of characters’ glasses.
The bespectacled one in those books is Klaus Baudelaire, who with his two sisters endures hardship after hardship including the death of their parents. It’s a mysterious tale told in such a clever witty tone that you can’t help but keep reading.
Klaus uses his glasses to read to an almost super human degree, helping them to survive, while his sisters use powers of inventing and biting (you might just have to trust me there.) That’s probably why it’s particularly tragic, then, when Klaus’ tool for reading is used against him. In the fourth book “The Miserable Mill” his glasses are used to help hypnotize him into being part of the evil Count Olaf’s nefarious plot.
What once brought clarity now holds him back. It’s just not fair, but then again, nothing is in those books… or really, you know, in life.
By reading mysteries like these, we can see a reflection of our own search for clarity in our messy, muddy lives. That’s why it’s so satisfying when the Baudelaires get clues about the mysteries they face, from who their parents really were to what vile plot Count Olaf will hatch next.
One particularly satisfying set of clues later come, appropriately enough for Klaus, in and around a library marked with the phrase “The World is Quiet Here.”
In addition to the information it imparts, that phrase signals a much-needed respite from the confusion and chaos of the Baudelaires’ adventures. It also highlights the value of quiet as opposed to silence. Silence is the absence of life, while quiet is life in focus. And what better place could you find quiet and focus than in a library, where knowledge is organized and one page leads helpfully to the next. As Lemony Snicket himself says:
“If you feel . . . that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to world filled with schisms and sirens and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, ‘The world is quiet here,’ as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.”
Stepping into such a place can be akin to the feeling you get when the sun suddenly comes out from behind a cloud. Instantly my mood lifts and my brain fog clears. Not only can you literally see better, but everything is in its place. Each object casts a precise shadow showing place and time. Knowledge is organized.
That also happens in a good yoga studios, which are designed for quiet and focus. In a class there knowledge of your muscles is organized, and your weird sort-of painful and flabby body makes sense. Your mind stops scattering and you can focus on that one pose and then the next.
It’s so affirming and uplifting, and brings such focus, that you really notice it when something holds you back – a cold, a pain, etc. I thought of that recently while doing Bound Side Angle pose. Once you’re into it, you really are tied up in knots. You are holding yourself back, literally. And as you resist the urge to just let go, you think about all the other things that hold you back.
My waters are muddied by so many things. Getting not quite enough sleep. Pride which is really insecurity. Need to control which is really insecurity, too. Anxiety, to a huge degree. Side effects from the drugs used to treat the anxiety. Not eating the “right” food. The side effects from eating food which is “right” but isn’t right for my system. Flab on my body. Clutter in my house. Other people held back by the things that muddy their waters.
Even the things I do specifically for clarity – like yoga class or writing this blog, can be distracting and take time from other things that must be done, leading to panicking about time later. To make it worse, the “world is quiet” library may charge you high fines and the sun outside can be blinding.
Life is very confusing when the things you use to make them less confusing make them more confusing.
All your confusing complications are not easily excised from your life – nor should they be, probably. My glasses stay on, and not only because I can’t stand contact lenses. I need them to see, whether or not somebody messes with them with an evil plot. Houses have clutter, bodies have flab, and the Baudelaire orphans must deal with the dystopian reality they find themselves in.
But the reason I think people love these books so much is that the Baudelaire orphans are held back but not held up. They leave the library and keep going. They maintain their focus on organizing their knowledge to do what is right, despite everything. The clear-cut, precise writing style reflects that, as does the continual introduction of new vocabulary words. For if as I’ve heard science is organized knowledge, then vocabulary is organized thought.
Use your powers to organize your world, maybe starting with the glasses on your face. They might fail you or hold you back, but if the Baudelaires can solve their mysteries, so we can we.
Thoughts...?!