I am again overcome by a great love of Diane Duane. I'm sure I've told you all a million times that you should read her books because they really will change your life, but I mean it. So much of who I am and who I want to be -- not just as a writer, but as a person -- is within the pages of her books, specifically the Young Wizards series that she began more than twenty years ago.
I just finished listening to the audiobook of Deep Wizardry, the second book in the series and one of my favorites. This is how good it is: even listening to the audiobook made me cry, in all the right places and for all the right reasons. Maybe that's more of a reflection of my current emotional state than it is of the book itself, but I don't like to think so. I'm really mad I don't have my own copy of it here, because if I did I'd fill this entry with quotes from it that make me feel more myself. Because there are so many of those...
I read Deep Wizardry for the first time the summer after sixth grade, when I was on vacation in the Caribbean for a week. I'd read the first book in the series, So You Want to Be A Wizard, sometime before, but whenever I read Deep Wizardry I'm brought back to that catamaran that I lived on with my family for a week, the feel of sailing and the ubiquity of the sea. I took it for granted that I had these beautiful warm waters to swim through, dive in, live off of. And then I got stung by a jellyfish pretty badly at Virgin Gorda, five or six days through the week, and I was belowdecks for a while trying to ignore the pain, and reading. I picked up Deep Wizardry and it couldn't have been more appropriate. It was all about the ocean, it turned out, featuring sharks and whales as important characters. But it was -- and is! -- about so much more than that. Whenever I look at the cover of my slightly-battered copy of Deep Wizardry, I'm transported back to Virgin Gorda and Marina Cay and Tortola, reading in beach chairs that had been pulled down into a few feet of water so that I reclined within the rolling-in of small waves.
But the book is so much bigger than that. There are questions from Deep Wizardry that the series still hasn't answered -- pretty impressive considering that it's now going into its ninth book (which I of course cannot wait to get my hands on). And it's not just the questions. It's the everything. Deep Wizardry is about how friendship grows and changes, how children interact with their parents, telling the truth, sacrifice and redemption, facing your death, making mistakes, defying evil, the environment, magic, love, loss, life. It's about people and wizards and whales and a shark or two. It's got a visit to the moon -- the one that I wrote my college entrance essay for Stanford about, the one that sticks with me today so that everything I think about space travel and wizardry is informed by it.
I don't know why I'm writing this. It's not particularly eloquent. But I just love how this book -- these books, really, anything she writes -- can always make me feel alright about the universe. Her explanation of life, death, and afterlife comforts me more than any other one that I've run into. And her idea of wizardry, the purpose of which is, pure and simple, to serve Life, and make sure it keeps on going, is fundamental to my understanding of creation and the world around me. I find it hard to believe that she's an atheist; I get a greater sense of spirituality from her writing than I do from a lot of other people. Not only is there a Creator, but there is an afterlife where "what's loved, survives." This principle seems like a pretty sound one to me.
Now I'm just rambling and I've got a bunch of things I should be doing, like getting ready to go to the book signing in San Francisco later this afternoon (yes, Katherine, I am getting Jim Butcher to sign something for you). I just needed to talk about this, for whatever reason, even if it's talking to no one.
And I lied. I'm gonna leave you with some quotes after all.
***
It hurt, she said.
We know, the answer came back. We sorrow. Do you?
For what happened?
No. For who you are now--the person you weren’t a week ago.
...No.
***
“It must be a crippled life your people live up there, without magic, without what can’t be understood, only accepted--”
--Ed (he's a shark!)
***
But Nita’s mother was looking up at the sky with a look of joy so great it was pain—the completely bearable anguish of an impossible dream that suddenly comes true after years of hopeless yearning. Tears were running down her mother’s face at the sight of that sky, so pure a velvet black that the eye insisted on finding light in it where light was not—a night sky set with thousands of stars, all blazing with a cold, fierce brilliance that only astronauts ever saw; a night sky that nonetheless had a ravening sun standing noonday high in it, pooling all their shadows black and razor-sharp about their feet.
***
What they saw was part of a disk four times the size of the moon as seen from Earth; and it seemed even bigger because of the Moon’s foreshortened horizon. It was not the full Earth so familiar from pictures, but a waning crescent, streaked with cloud swirls and burning with a fierce green-blue radiance—a light with a depth, like the fire held in the heart of an opal. That light banished the idea that blue and green were “cool” colors; one could have warmed one’s hands at that crescent. The blackness to which it shaded was ever so faintly touched with silver—a disk more hinted at than seen; the new Earth in the old Earth’s arms.
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