Combinatory Play

Einstein himself called this the “combinatory play” of the mind and considered it a cornerstone of genius. Csikszentmihalyi points out that L’Engle’s gift for bringing together “domains that appear to have nothing in common” is common to most creative individuals in his study:

Most breakthroughs are based on linking information that usually is not thought of as related. Integration, synthesis both across and within domains, is the norm rather than the exception.

This idea, most famously put forth by pioneering Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner in his seminal work from the 1960s, is also something Stephen Jay Gould memorably articulated and Kandinsky captured beautifully in asserting that “to harmonize the whole is the task of art.” But in L’Engle’s work, Csikszentmihalyi notes, these cross-pollinations transcend the practical and stretch into the conceptual, bridging “events at the cosmic and the microscopic levels” and producing “a sort of a karmic web [that] pervades her narrative.”

In commenting on this creative composting, L’Engle speaks to the larger theme of interconnectedness:

A lot of ideas come subconsciously. You don’t even realize where they’re coming from. I try to read as widely as possible, and I read fairly widely in the areas of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because to me these are very exciting. They’re dealing with the nature of being and what it’s all about. One of the things that we have learned, having opened the heart of the atom, is that nothing happens in isolation, that everything in the universe is interrelated… And another thing [scientists have] discovered is that nothing can be studied objectively, because to look at something is to change it and to be changed by it. Those are pretty potent ideas.

But L’Engle’s most defining ethos is that of hope and mercy — something Csikszentmihalyi notes was cultivated by her own experience. She recalls having “terrible teachers” as a young child, who assumed that her physical disability — a faulty knee that rendered her clumsy at any athletic activity — also meant that she “wasn’t very bright.” And yet the disheartening experience was essential to L’Engle’s creative development. Csikszentmihalyi recounts his conversation with the author:

Shunned by peers and teachers, Madeleine spent much of her childhood reading and thinking alone. Now she feels that she couldn’t have written her books if she had been happy and successful with her peers. Like most individuals in our sample, she showed her creativity first of all by being able to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.

-Brain Pickings