Gift from the Sea
1955
(A time of relaxed solitude on a beach inspires meditations on how to retain inner peace amid the distractions and complexity of modern life).
All text except quotations is copyright 2000 by David Lahti, and represents his views alone. Please comment on this page in my guestbook.
CONTENTS:
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Ch.1, The Beach: an introduction; of the beach and solitude, and their powers of soothing and rejuvenating the soul.
Ch.2, Channelled Whelk: praise for simplicity of life, paring down the unnecessities, if only temporarily, in order to put things in proper perspective.
Ch.3, Moon Shell: the virtues of solitude; woman naturally gives, but she can have nothing to give if she does not know the island of her inner self, which requires being alone, without distractions.
Ch.4, Double Sunrise: on relationships, especially that of husband and wife; they change, and the initial purity is lost; but this is growth, this is life; the pure relationship is a stage-- then complications must come.
Ch.5, Oyster Bed: In this most active, adult, competing years of life, we get complicated, adapted, multifaceted. Eventually even these complications and additions recede and, in middle age, we must grow again-- a second adolescence.
Ch.6, Argonauta: Personal relationships must become mature, by each person coming to the relationship as a whole person. Woman, for example, must be whole before man and woman can have this kind of deep relationship. This mature relationship is characterized by self-awareness, swinging from intimacy to the general and abstract, and also by variability and intermittency.
Ch.7, A Few Shells: The island life is beautiful becomes it is "ringed with space"-- simple, set apart. When returning to the crowded life, this atmosphere will no longer be there to "naturally select" for one. One must carry homeward the values one has learned. The shells will be reminders.
Ch.8, The Beach at my Back: Modern life pulls us in so many directions, that we can't do it all. A clue to a solution is not to be so obsessed with the future that we do not enjoy the present. Only then can we have the presence of mind to grow and love.
This book encourages simplicity and single-mindedness within a culture of so much complexity and distraction. Being a short, simple, yet profound book itself, it takes its own advice. The book is composed of a few beautiful words "framed with space", as the author would say. The work itself is Lindbergh's perspective in action, and for this reason it is not only the argument in the book which sets forth her insights, but the work's soft and simple presence and its thoughtful atmosphere. We feel when reading it as though we have gone through the same series of reflections and realizations as she has.
The blurb on my book jacket (not written by the author) gives the impression that this is a woman's book for women, and men might as well pass it by for something more... well, let’s just say something else. This is a very unfortunate and misleading impression to give, however. This is women's literature in the same sense that Montaigne's Essays or Marcus Aurelius's Meditations are men's literature. They are written by members of their respective sexes, and therefore demonstrate distinctive perspectives to whatever extent the sexes think or see things differently. For a woman to take this as a reason to avoid Montaigne would be ridiculous, however, and so for a man to take Lindbergh's femininity as a reason to avoid Gift from the Sea is just as ridiculous. She speaks, as Montaigne or Thoreau speaks, to humanity. She does use woman as her dominant example, and speaks mainly of issues that she as a woman has found to be most acute. She may even have what some literary critic or sociologist might conjure up as a "woman's" approach to a conclusion to these issues. But, first of all, people of the male sex might just learn a bit about women by reading honest, thoughtful works by members of that sex. And, more importantly, Lindbergh makes plain her opinion that the truest woman is not the one who would set her thoughts and ideas up in competition with those of man, but the one who brings her ideas forth more positively, as a whole person. And when she does this, her thoughts and ideas will be relevant and edifying to any other person who seeks to be whole. And the ideas in this book certainly are relevant and edifying. Still, of course, we discover in Lindbergh an extra dimension which will be of particular relevance to womanhood. To stress the relevance of her insights for humanity in general is certainly not to downplay her importance for women.
With respect to her style and
personality, I did not hesitate above to compare Lindbergh to Montaigne and Thoreau.
They are all personal and honest. They set their minds free and bestow their
produce to us in a very readable and endearing way. Like Montaigne, Lindbergh
is very well read and spices her thoughts with the endorsement of wise men
throughout time. And like Thoreau, she is practical, inspired by nature, and
(in a way) existential, imparting thoughts and perspectives that can help us
make sense of our world and ourselves even as we are involved in our routines.
This book is full of simplicity, like a casual conversation-- and yet few
conversations are as fruitful.
Top of Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea
"I had the feeling, when the thoughts first clarified on paper, that my experience was very different from other people's."
-Prologue.
"The Beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think."
-ch.1.
"One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind".
-ch.1.
"To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach-waiting for a gift from the sea."
-ch.1.
"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."
-ch.2.
"I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God."
-ch.2.
"I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others."
-ch.2.
"For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication."
-ch.2.
"This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation."
-ch.2.
"Distraction is, always has been, and probably always will be, inherent in woman's life.
"For 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."
-ch.2.
"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."
-ch.2.
"'No man is an island,' said John Donne. I feel we are all islands-in a common sea.
"We are all, in the last analysis, alone."
-ch.3.
"How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity."
-ch.3.
"We must re-learn to be alone."
-ch.3.
"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 nor 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. When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too."
-ch.3.
"Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim."
-ch.3.
"Today, in our comparative comfort, many women hardly feel indispensable any more, either in the primitive struggle to survive or as the cultural font of the home. No longer fed by a feeling of indispensability or purposefulness, we are hungry, and not knowing what we are hungry for, we fill up the void with endless distractions".
-ch.3.
"Hunger cannot, of course, be fed merely by a feeling of indispensability. Even purposeful giving must have some source that refills it. The milk in the breast must be replenished by food taken into the body. If it is woman's function to give, she must be replenished too. But how?
"Solitude, says the moon shell."
-ch.3.
"What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it-like a secret vice!"
-ch.3.
"The Feminists did not look that far ahead; they laid down no rules of conduct. For them it was enough to demand the privileges. The exploration of their use, as in all pioneer movements, was left open to the women who would follow. And woman today is still searching. We are aware of our hunger and needs, but still ignorant of what will satisfy them."
-ch.3.
"...woman must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities; that she must be the pioneer in achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization."
-ch.3.
"While man, in his realm, has less chance for personal relations than woman, he may have more opportunities for giving himself creatively in work. Woman, on the other hand, has more chance for personal relations, but these do not give her a sense of her creative identity, the individual who has something of her own to say or to give."
-ch.4.
"Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own."
-ch.4.
"One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth."
-ch.4.
"The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things."
-ch.4.
"So most couples in the growing years of marriage struggle to achieve a place in the world. It is a physical and material battle first of all, for a home, for children, for a place in their particular society. In the midst of such a life there is not much time to sit facing one another over a breakfast table."
-ch.5.
"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."
-ch.5.
"We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action, and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, overreaching and overstraining ourselves in the unnatural effort."
-ch.5.
"Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of 'coming of age'-to learn how to stand alone. She must learn not to depend on another, nor to feel she must prove her strength by competing with another. In the past, she has swung between these two opposite poles of dependence and competition, of Victorianism and Feminism. Both extremes throw her off balance; neither is the center, the true center of being a whole woman. She must find her true center alone. She must become whole."
-ch.6.
"For we are, actually, pioneers trying to find a new path through the maze of tradition, convention and dogma."
-ch.6.
"...good communication is stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after."
-ch.6.
"First touch, intimate touch of the personal and particular (the chores in the kitchen, the talk by the fire); then the loss of intimacy in the great stream of the impersonal and abstract (the silent beach, the bowl of stars overhead). Both partners are lost in a common sea of the universal which absorbs and yet frees, which separates and yet unites. Is this not what the more mature relationship, the meeting of two solitudes, is meant to be?"
-ch.6.
"The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty."
-ch.7.
"For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms."
-ch.7.
"...we tend to select people like ourselves, a very monotonous diet... we tend not to choose the unknown which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. And yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching."
-ch.7.
"My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old age."
-ch.8.
"America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future."
-ch.8.
"The here, the now, and the individual, have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet, and-from time immemorial-the woman."
-ch.8.
Top of Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea
...you need to get your act together, to find yourself, to be alone and get centered; or, you are going to a beach or another natural spot and want some thoughtful accompaniment.
Top of Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea
If you like this, you'd also like...
(for the snooper into wise reflections and journals:)
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (180's).
-Augustine, Confessions (400).
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1788).
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).
(for the attender to philosophical women:)
-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949).
-Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970).
-Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (1978).
Top of Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea
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Top of Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea
