A Classic Book That Speaks to Women Today
Why you should read “Gift from the Sea” by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I don’t remember when I first read this slim book of quiet wisdom and poetic vision. Published in 1955, it was a hit with my mother’s generation, and after I was married, I discovered that my mother-in-law kept a battered first edition of the book by her bedside. When she died, that copy came to live at my own bedside.
The book uses shells collected on a solitary trip to the beach to illustrate the challenges of each stage in a woman’s life, from the “double sunrise” of early relationship, to the beautiful image of a fragile argonaut riding the currents on the open sea. Anne Morrow Lindbergh — wife of the legendary pilot, Charles Lindbergh — lived a life that was both filled with adventure and privilege, and marked by incredible tragedy.
A shy, introspective college student, Anne met her future husband when he was literally the toast of society, considered the most eligible bachelor in the world. On a world tour in 1927 following his successful trans-Atlantic flight aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, Charles stopped over at the home of Anne’s diplomat father in Mexico City. The marriage that followed swept her into a life of celebrity she never imagined or wanted — a celebrity that would lead indirectly to the eventual kidnapping and murder of their first child, in what an avid press called “The Crime of the Century.”
Fleeing from the notoriety to a secluded life in Europe, the couple went on to have five more children. Although Anne never mentioned the tragedy in her published writings, it lends a constant, poignant bass note to her work. She writes movingly of her search for simplicity and “grace.” In Gift from the Sea, she walks the beach alone, mulling over the perennial battle between a woman’s desire to care for others and her need to nourish herself.
The moon shell she picks up first symbolizes her hope of finding a still and constant center point from which the many demands and interests of her life can radiate without pulling her apart:
How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint — the inner inviolable core, the single eye. […] The problem is 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…
She writes about the challenge of finding time for solitude in the midst of a busy life:
We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen. …instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. [But] it is not physical solitude that actually separates one from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation…. Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover.
If the moon shell points to simplicity and solitude, other shells serve as metaphors for different aspects of life. While her reflections on marriage are dated, her description of family life as a knobbly, ungainly bed of oysters remains very true:
…untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations and… firmly embedded on its rock. It suggests the struggle of life itself.
And then, inevitably, she comes full circle:
The tide of life recedes. The house begins, little by little, to empty. […] Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells: the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego…. Perhaps one can at last in middle age, if not earlier, be completely oneself. And what a liberation that would be!
Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote this book at the time of her own mid-life, looking back on a life and marriage that included great heartache — besides the loss of her child, her husband had many affairs and even a second family that he supported — as well as personal and professional fulfillment. She speaks from experience when she writes:
How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one’s existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave? […] 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…
Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid. And my shells? I can sweep them all into my pocket. They are only there to remind me that the sea recedes and returns eternally.
This classic book is a short read, but one that any woman, at any phase in life, can relate to and learn from.
