Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Source of book: I own this

 

This book was my beach read for a recent weekend camping trip to the beach. For obvious reasons, it was an ideal choice.

 

For this post, I really will be doing two different posts about this book. The first is about the book itself as a work of art - and it is a truly beautiful bit of writing. It will definitely resonate with a certain kind of person (me included) - one who is introverted, responsible, introspective, poetic, and a bit harried by modern life. For extroverts, the book might seem a bit odd. For those not as fond of poetry, it might seem a bit nebulous. And naturally, for those who do not feel the weight of social and family responsibility, it might seem unnecessary. Your mileage may vary. 

 

A more justifiable criticism of the book is that it, like so many other books in the “self care” genre, it tends to assume a certain level of affluence that is unavailable to many. It seems tone deaf to those for whom any vacation is out of reach, for example. And also, with its admonition to turn inward, it tends to exclude the kind of caring for those outside the immediate circle - at one point Anne advises the reader that caring too much about too much is more than any person can handle. A partial truth, but also an excuse to avoid facing one’s privilege and advocating for those outside one’s own socioeconomic circles. 

 

This, by the way, also relates to the second thing I want to discuss. The Lindberghs were complicated people, with Charles in particular being a pretty horrible person, and the main reason Anne had to work to repair their reputation after World War Two. She too said some fairly unsavory things, whether out of naivety or something darker is less clear than with Charles. So, I will attempt to unpack some of the context of the book in the second part. 

 

***

 

First, about the book itself. Gift From the Sea is a series of connected essays, arising from a vacation that Anne took by herself on a barrier island in Florida in the 1950s. She describes five different sea shells she collects, and relates them to her topics. She explores ideas of love and marriage, youth and age, solitude and responsibility, and particularly the difficulties facing women in finding the time and resources to replenish their own souls. These are timeless ideas, and Anne handles them with a lovely and thoughtful touch. 

 

The fact of the matter is that she had five surviving children to care for, a husband who had…let’s just say “issues,” and a lot of social expectations that she struggled to meet. For the introverted parent (and I say this from my own experience, as well as watching my more introverted wife), children can be exhausting, particularly when they are young and very needy. We men are socially expected to be away from our children regularly. Not just for our jobs - although those are definitely a chance to get away - but also for guys nights out and other activities. Society expects women to do the childcare to make all of that happen. 

 

Although the culture has shifted a lot, there is still a definite expectation that men do not have to do the same for the mothers of their children. Often, a woman is deemed “selfish” for wanting time by herself. Plus, even if she works, she is expected to do that “second shift” of childcare and housework. 

 

In my own marriage, we chose to do things differently. She worked nights part time; I worked days part time. We each had time away from the children, as well as time with them. For the past nearly ten years, I have taken the kids camping by myself, and given her the chance to take trips on her own, without the responsibility of family. We found ways to make sure that each of us have had chances to center ourselves, and refresh our souls. 

 

Anne Morrow Lindbergh reminds me a lot of my wife for these reasons. She was, by any reasonable standard, the more talented spouse (she flew with her husband, but wasn’t able to be the pioneer he was in that area due to her childcare responsibilities and general sexism.) Her writing has endured. 

 

So much in this book resonated with me. I too need my solitude, my introspection, and an more holistic connection with the universe.

 

Gift From the Sea is a short book, and I do not wish to try to summarize every idea in it. I will just hit a few highlights in the quotes. First is the introduction. 

 

I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships. And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started naturally to write. I had the feeling, when the thoughts first clarified on paper, that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?) My situation had, in certain ways, more freedom than that of most people, and in certain other ways, much less.

Besides, I thought, not all women are searching for a new pattern of living, or want a contemplative corner of their own. Many women are content with their lives as they are. They manage amazingly well, far better than I, it seemed to me, looking at their lives from the outside. With envy and admiration, I observed the porcelain perfection of their smoothly ticking days,. Perhaps they had no problems, or had found the answers long ago. No, I decided, these discussions would have value and interest only for myself.

But as I went on writing and simultaneously talking with other women, young and old, with different lives and experiences - those who supported themselves, those who wished careers, those who were hard-working housewives and mothers, and those with more ease - I found that my point of view was not unique. I discovered that many women, and men, too, were grappling with essentially the same questions as I, and were hungry to discuss and argue and hammer out possible answers. Even those whose lives had appeared to be ticking imperturbably under their smiling clock-faces were often trying, like me, to evolve another rhythm with more creative pauses in it, more adjustment to their individual needs, and new and more alive relationships to themselves as well as others.

And so gradually, these chapters, fed by conversations, arguments and revelations from men and women of all groups, became more than my individual story, until I decided in the end to give them back to the people who had shared and stimulated many of these thoughts. Here, then, with my warm feelings of gratitude and companionship for those working along the same lines, I return my gift from the sea.

 

The first shell is abandoned by a hermit crab, and the author notes that this reminds her of herself. 

 

I too have run away, I realize, I have shed the shell of my life, for these few weeks of vacation. 

 

And what is she seeking? 

 

But I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints - to live “in grace” as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. 

 

Yeah, me too, Anne, me too. 

 

In a later chapter, she writes of something that has haunted me a lot as of late. 

 

For it is not physical solitude that actually separates one from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nore the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. 

 

Having over the last decade lost my sense of connection to my former religious tribe, as well as my parents (and for largely the same reasons), this makes sense. The loneliness of searching for water - the spiritual connection - in the hearts of others, and realizing that it simply isn’t there, that their minds and hearts have become deserts, devoid of what once nourished, has been devastating. I had naively assumed that “love your neighbor” and “do unto others” still resided there, but it has long since dried up, in favor of a vicious theopolitical ideology that views outsiders with hate and fear. Unfortunately, Anne’s prescription of knowing one’s self better can’t repair all. It has to be on both sides. 

 

Later in that chapter, she writes superbly about the struggles women face in finding solitude. 

 

Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day. How revolutionary that sounds and how impossible of attainment. To many women such a program seems quite out of reach. They have no extra income to spend on a vacation for themselves; no time left over from the weekly drudgery of housework for a day off; no energy after the daily cooking, cleaning and washing for even an hour of creative solitude. 

Is this then only an economic problem? I do not think so. Every paid worker, no matter where in the economic scale, expects a day off a week and a vacation a year. By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class. They rarely even complain of their lack, apparently not considering occasional time to themselves as a justifiable need. 

Herein lies one key to the problem. If women were convinced that a day off or an hour of solitude was a reasonable ambition, they would find a way of attaining it. As it is, they feel so unjustified in their demand that they rarely make the attempt.

 

Another chapter discusses the different periods of life, particularly as they relate to romantic relationships. I think there is a lot of truth here for good relationships, although I have to wonder how colored Anne’s thinking was by the problems her own marriage faced. Her basic point that change is the one universal, and that there is no relationship that does not change, and that therefore we should neither mourn changes in our relationships nor attempt to recapture a past version. 

 

It is true, of course, that the original relationship is very beautiful. Its self-enclosed perfection wears the freshness of a spring morning. Forgetting about the summer to come, one often feels one would like to prolong the spring of early love, when two people stand as individuals, without past or future, facing each other. One resents any change, even though one knows that transformation is natural and part of the process of life and its evolution. Like its parallel in physical passion, the early ecstatic stage of a relationship cannot continue always at the same pitch of intensity. It moves to another phase of growth which one should not dread, but welcome as one welcomes summer after spring. 

 

Anne also ties this in with the human tendency not just to want to be loved, but to be “loved alone” as Auden puts it. She quotes a stanza from Auden to that effect. 

 

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

 

It isn’t that it is wrong to want monogamy, for example - that is not the point at all. Rather, no person can exist loving only one, and living only for one. Any parent knows this. Our time and attention for our spouses are subdivided by our children. So, as Anne notes, we need those moments of “loved alone” when we can get them, but have to realize that they are just that - moments. And that does not make them invalid or valueless. 

 

She goes on in the next chapter to discuss marriage in more detail. The way that marriage starts out as a “double-sunrise” shell, but becomes more like an oyster, with its odd shapes and accommodations to circumstance. It also clings fast to its bed, because of the many threads of bond that are created. 

 

Here the bonds of marriage are formed. For marriage, which is always spoken of as a bond, becomes actually, in this stage, many bonds, many strands, of different texture and strength, making up a web that is taut and firm. The web is fashioned of love. Yes, but many kinds of love: romantic love first, then a slow-growing devotion, and, playing through these, a constantly rippling companionship. It is made of loyalties, and interdependencies, and shared experiences. It is woven of memories of meetings and conflicts; of triumphs and disappointments. It is a web of communication, a common language, and the acceptance of lack of language too; a knowledge of likes and dislikes, of habits and reactions, both physical and mental. It is a web of instincts and intuitions, and known and unknown exchanges. The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward and working outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.

 

Anne advocates for something which must have seemed shocking at the time: separate vacations for husband and wife. In some ways, this still seems shocking. My wife gets some interesting looks when she mentions that she goes on vacation without me - and that the kids and I go on vacation without her. (I’m more of a social vacationer - I get more solitude in other ways, plus I am less of an introvert.) But we have found that this really does work better for us. We take vacations together. And not together. 

 

I like the way that Anne envisions the ideal relationship of the future: one that is fully equal, a meeting of two fully developed and independent persons. She sees this as a potential future, after the kids are grown, and the couple has grown beyond youth. 

 

Is the golden fleece that awaits us some kind of new freedom for growth? And in this new freedom, is there any place for a relationship? I believe there is, after the oyster bed, an opportunity for the best relationship of all: not a limited, mutually exclusive one, like the sunrise shell; and not a functional, dependent one, as in the oyster bed; but the meeting of two whole fully developed people as persons. It would be, to borrow a definition of the Scottish philosopher, MacMurray, a fully personal relationship, that is, “a type of relationship into which people enter as persons with the whole of themselves.” “Personal relationships,” he goes on to explain, “...have no ulterior motive. They are not based on particular interests. They do not serve partial and limited ends. Their value lies entirely in themselves and for the same reason transcends all other values. And that is because they are relations of persons as persons.” This relationship of “persons as persons” was hinted at by the German poet, Rilke, almost fifty years ago. He foresaw a great change in the relationships between men and women, which he hoped in the future would no longer follow the traditional patterns of submission and domination or of possession and competition. He described a state in which there would be space and freedom for growth, and in which each partner would be the means of releasing the other. 

 

This is the relationship my wife and I have always aspired to. And it coexists with the others - mutual exclusivity, functional and dependent - but always “persons as persons,” not as gendered functions. 

 

Anne further notes that such relationships will not only be freeing for women, but also freeing for men, whose emotional range is hampered by social pressures. 

 

Must not man also become world to himself? Must he not also expand the neglected sides of his personality; the art of inward looking that he has seldom time for in his active outward-going life; the personal relationships which he has not had as much chance to enjoy; the so-called feminine qualities, aesthetic, emotional, cultural, and spiritual, which he has been too rushed to fully develop. Perhaps both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit - qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected. It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself.

 

The island sojourn, like everything, must come to an end, however, and Anne must return to her regular life. She notes that this too is part of the inevitable change that is part and parcel of existence. 

 

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. 

 

I confess I struggle with this. I often fear during the ebb that things will never return. And maybe I am right about some things. But not everything. The only constant is change, and any chance of predicting, let alone controlling, the future is futile and a chasing after the wind. 

 

So, that gives some ideas, I hope. It truly is a beautiful and thoughtful book. I definitely recommend it.

 

***

 

Now, let’s turn to the problem of the Lindberghs. 

 

Charles Lindbergh is known to all of us for his transatlantic flight. We often remember this as the first transatlantic flight, but it wasn’t. Rather, it was the first solo transatlantic flight, and the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris. Accomplishments to be sure, but a shame to forget the other pioneers. 

 

A few of us remember the tragedy that came with fame for the Lindberghs. Their infant son was kidnapped from their home, held for ransom, and murdered. This trauma, plus the continuing death threats against their other children (people can be so horrid) caused them to flee to France, returning only at the outbreak of World War Two. 

 

And that’s where things got sideways. First, to be clear, there are things about the Lindbergh’s views and activities which have been unfairly characterized. They were hardly alone in being isolationist or advocating for the US to stay out of the war. And, honestly, they weren’t crazy or even wrong about this in the moral sense. It’s just that subsequent events - Hitler’s conquest of continental Europe, Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor - change the entire outlook of the war from the American perspective. To give a current example, the US is assisting Ukraine in defending against Russian invasion. Some today think we should stay completely out of it. Others think we should declare war on Russia. The mainstream view is like it was in 1941: supply weapons, but don’t directly fight. (Lend-lease all over again.) Will this be the best course of action? We do not know. Subsequent events will (maybe) reveal all. 

 

Had the Lindbergh’s simply been anti-war activists, I think we could have chalked it up to going against public sentiment and getting some things wrong. Unfortunately, there was worse. 

 

Charles in particular held some nasty views on race. Not that he was the only person of his time (or ours) to believe that white people - and northern Europeans in particular - were superior to everyone else. And not that he was the only person of his time (and ours) advocating for some form of eugenics. (In fact, that is the unspoken value system behind the economic policies of the GOP - thank you, Ayn Rand…) Charles’ views - which he loudly proclaimed - weren’t meaningfully different from those of Hitler and the KKK. Yeah, so problematic. 

 

To be fair to Charles, he seems (along with Anne) to have toned that rhetoric down a lot later in life, and in fact they became environmental advocates who noted the way colonialism and industrialism devastated indigenous communities. So, maybe some positive growth there. 

 

Anne didn’t go in for the racism the way Charles did, but she did say two troubling things. The first was a clear blunder that many others of the time made: she said in the 1930s that Hitler wasn’t interested in conquering Europe, and that he could be appeased. Yeah, that aged well. Just like the current right wing worship of Donald Trump is going to look really stupid in 20 years. Maybe sooner. 

 

The other was that she thought that both Fascism and Communism were, while imperfect, necessary and inevitable, seeing them as similar to the French Revolution, which was bloody and horrid, but necessary to end the monarchy. Again, of course, this was written before the war, and before Stalin’s purges, and so on. Hindsight exposed the foolishness of this opinion as well. 

 

Had these views been expressed in, say, 1910, they might have been forgotten or relegated to a footnote in the history books. But the Lindberghs had the bad timing to say them right before a world war that literally seemed to be good versus evil. And I myself believe that WWII was a highly unusual war in that it did have a moral clarity that few wars ever have. Hitler truly was unprecedented in his single-minded fanatical devotion to “aryan” supremacy, and his inability to act in his own or his country’s best interest. Following so closely on the heels of WWI, which was possibly the most nonsensical and pointless war ever, it was easier to believe that nobody could be so crazy and/or stupid as to do what Hitler did. And tried to do. 

 

So, as far as the political views go, I think it is fair to condemn the Lindberghs for the racism and “people like us first” attitude, even while acknowledging that they were hardly unique. But I think it is also important to grant them the fact that they did seem to grow in a positive direction after the war, rather than double down on their mistakes. 

 

A bit more personal stuff is worth mentioning. Anne was an accomplished pilot in her own right, and one wonders if, but for her marriage, she might have been as famous as Amelia Earhart. That she was also well educated, thoughtful, and a good writer is also true. She represented the shift that occurred in the 20th century: women gained in education, and education stopped being seen as a disadvantage for marriage and parenthood. Women like her paved the way for women like my wife, demonstrating that motherhood and personhood were not mutually exclusive, and that women had the right to expect men to participate in child care too. 

 

Now, let’s turn a bit to Charles, who, well, let’s just state it outright. Anne didn’t know it until Charles’ death, but Charles actually had four families he supported. He had children by two French sisters, as well as by a private secretary. He (and his mistresses) kept this a secret, although he sent money. The children of these liaisons didn’t even know who their father was until after his death. Now, before you feel too sorry for Anne, there is evidence that she had her own affair - and indeed, one wonders from Gift From the Sea if they had kind of an open marriage arrangement by that point. And there is also the question of just how unaffectionate Charles was - although they were in their own way devoted to each other. 

 

I think “complicated” is a good way to describe both of them. There is the good and the bad and the ugly. For myself, I read the book as a work of art - and it is indeed beautiful, even in its imperfections. For those of us who advocate for social justice (or, as the Bible calls it, justice), books like this can be a reminder that we need to care for our own psyches too. It is exhausting right now, with the forces of hate and hierarchy on the march, to continue to care. So we do need to take a step back, and, to a degree, embrace our lack of control, even as we continue to work for a better world. It is a balance. We look inward as we look outward. We care for ourselves as we care for others. And, as Anne dreamed of for the future, we build our mutual relationships between “persons as persons” - that communion of equal souls, each entire of itself yet deeply interconnected.