I’ve been
thinking a lot lately about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the American author and
poet, who was married to Charles Lindbergh, the famous American aviator. Their
life together is the stuff of legend—traveling in their own small plane around the world, the
kidnapping and murder of their infant son, living in Europe to escape the subsequent media circus, their celebrity
status in the USA—all detailed in the individual biographies written about each
of them.
Anne Morrow
Lindbergh dreamed of and attained a successful literary career in the course of
her long life; she lived to be 94 years old and was a poet and author of a number of
books. She also learned to fly and accompanied her famous husband
on many of his flights as his co-pilot. She was likely unaware of his extramarital
affairs with several German women that resulted in a number of children. If she
did know, she took her secret with her in death, and coped in life in the way
that she knew best--she pursued her writing. This is what she wrote about
writing:
“I cannot see what I have gone through until I
write it down. I am blind without a pencil……. I am convinced that you must
write as if no one were ever going to see it. Write it all, as personally and
specifically as you can, as deeply and honestly as you can. … In fact, I think
it is the only true way to reach the universal, through the knot-hole of the
personal. So do, do go ahead and write it as it boils up: the hot lava from the
unconscious. Don’t stop to observe, criticize, or be ‘ironic.’ Just write it,
like a letter, without rereading. Later, one can decide what to do.”
--From "Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986", by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2012, Pantheon)
But it is
her wonderful book--Gift from the Sea (published
in 1955)--that captured me with its wisdom, inspiration and simplicity. I first read
it when I was seventeen and it made a huge impression on me. She wrote
about women’s lives and responsibilities and how they often conflicted with the
desire to lead an independent life and to pursue a literary career. She wrote
the following:
“To be a woman is to have interests and duties,
raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the
hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be
open to all points of the compass: husband, children, friends, home, community;
stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that
blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a
balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for
the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of
attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules for holy living. How
desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint
-- the inner inviolable core, the single eye.
With a new awareness, both painful and
humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am
convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or
children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing,
feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand
details; human relationships with their myriad pulls -- woman's normal occupations
in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly
life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home,
Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst
of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal
forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks
come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
What is the answer? There is no easy answer, no
complete answer. I have only clues, shells from the sea. The bare beauty of the
channeled whelk tells me that one answer, and perhaps a first step, is in
simplification of life, in cutting out some of the distractions. But how? Total
retirement is not possible, I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot
permanently inhabit a desert island. I cannot be a nun in the midst of family
life. I would not want to be. The solution for me, surely, is neither in total
renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance
somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of
the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return. In my
periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly
life. I can at least practice for these two weeks the simplification of outward
life, as a beginning”.
-- From
''Gift From the Sea'' (1955, Pantheon)
