ITs Sameness

What I read: Calvin O'Keefe thinks he can handle things on his own.  He decides to go into a building called CENTRAL Central Intelligence Building, and he wants to go alone.  Meg and Charles Wallace don't agree and go with him.  Once inside, they find that every person inside is exactly the same.

There is one person who is different though, and that is the man with red eyes.  Meg tells the man that she and her brother want their father back.  As Meg tells him this, the man doesn't understand why they want their father to return home.  They eat a dinner, but all the food tastes like sand to Charles Wallace, who can't taste it unless he opens his mind to IT, which he won't do at this point.

But later, Charles Wallace seems to give in to IT.  IT has a rhythmic beating that is almost impossible to resist.  Meg tries really hard to think of other things, but IT is slowly starting to control her.  By the end of the chapter, Calvin says that they all need to tesser to escape IT and the entire building.

Meg sort of loses consciousness and when she wakes up again she can't move because she is frozen.  While Meg is frozen she hears Calvin and her father talking about how Mr. Murray ended up at Camazotz.  He explains that one of his colleagues tried to tesser from Earth to Mars.  But after he tried they couldn't tell if he was alive or not.  So Meg's father was the second to try to tesser and her ended up at Camazotz.

Meg tries to make a sound and let them know that she can hear them.  They finally realize that Meg can hear them and she starts asking where her brother Charles Wallace is.  When she finds out that they left him behind on Camazotz, she is really sad and angry about it.  Then Mr. Murray tells his daughter that "all things work together for good for them that love God" (190).


What I thought about:  I was really struck by the quote above and when I looked it up, I found out that it comes from the Holy Bible.  In the Bible, there is a quote from Romans that says, "All things work togther to those who love God."  This is interesting to me because this probably shows that Madeleine L'Engle was a religious woman.  Even if she wasn't really religious she at least knew a lot about the Bible, at least enough to put this in her own book.  This surprises me because it looks like Madeleine L'Engle is trying to put religious content in a book that is supposed to science fiction.  Most people think that science and religion have to be at opposite ends but this author seems to be into both, or at least she knows about both.  It makes me wonder how many other people are into both science and religion even though most people think they don't mix.

The other issue that I thought about a lot is how scary it would be to have something else controlling your mind.  It made me think about brain washing and how hard it would be to not be brain washed if someone was doing that to you.  

It made me think about the movie Star Wars when Anakin Skywalker gets brainwashed and turned into Darth Vader.  He turns to the dark side because of this, and it's a lot like Meg and Charles Wallace trying to resist IT, but having a hard time do it.

What I conclude: Reading these chapters I have to think about how hard it would be to face the problems that Meg and her family are facing.  If I was in this situation I might give up to IT and not be able to resist.  I think that this is what makes these characters unique in their own ways,

The other thing I realized is that no matter how tough you were, this situation would be so hard to deal with.  Meg is sure that she is right to go back for Charles Wallace, and it is hard to do the best for your loved ones but then also save yourself.  It seems like that's what Mr. Murray is doing in these chapters when he leaves his son behind.  Meg feels this is wrong but she isn't the one who gets to make the decision because she is still young.  When she talks to her father about it, he says that he is only human and that he makes mistakes too.