May 25, 2005
The Books: "Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage" (Madeleine L'Engle)
Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:
Next book in my Madeleine L'Engle nonfiction section is:
Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
This is the last of the Crosswicks Journal series. It is the story of Madeleine's long marriage to Hugh Franklin. It's the story of her childhood, his childhood, the years of their lives before they met, and finally ... the story of the meeting, the proposal, and the marriage. All of this is told with the backdrop of Franklin's current-day diagnosis of cancer. Madeleine wrote this book - the biography of her marriage - during the long months of his final illness. She's a real writer, man - The writing impulse in her never stops. The book is kind of a wrenching read - so so sad - and yet also joyous, an acknowledgement of their marriage, of the man she married.
Hugh Franklin and Madeleine L'Engle met in the early 1940s, when they were both were in a touring production of The Cherry Orchard. Madeleine was an actress as well as a writer. Success for her, as a writer, came late - although her first novel was sold when she was quite young. But there were a couple decades to go before Wrinkle in Time crashed onto the scene.
In the following excerpt, Madeleine writes about being a single girl, an actress and a writer, living in New York City ... before meeting Hugh Franklin. How did she sustain herself, keep things going? What were her sources of inspiration?
The title of the book is in reference to Bach's Two-Part Inventions, but of course it ends up being a larger metaphor for marriage. Marriage as a "two-part invention".
EXCERPT FROM Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
Summer came, and New York heat. On particularly hot and humid days I would open the door to my apartment, then prop open the door to the building. New York was a reasonably safe city in those days, but I am not sure it was that safe. I continued to work at St. Vincent's Hospital and to sell war bonds in theatre lobbies. Sometimes on my way home after a show I would be accosted by a drunken soldier or sailor, but I would just move out of the way and I never had any real problem. If someone started to be ugly, there was always somebody else around to say, "Is he bothering you?"
And I would take the subway home to my apartment, make some supper, turn to the piano, and play my way back to perspective. I was working on the Bach C-minor Toccata and Fugue (I'm still working on it), Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith Variations (still a marvelous finger exercise), and the Bach Two-Part Inventions. One is never through with the Two-Part Inventions; they are the essential practice needed for the Well-Tempered Clavier.
On unbearably hot nights I would ride the subway downtown to the bottom of the city with a friend, take the Staten Island ferry and cool off in the breeze from the water, then walk home along the docks, too ignorant to know that this is never a safe place at midnight. Again, it may have been our ignorance that protected us...
Despite a widening circle of friends, my solitude often turned to loneliness. I decided ruefully that what I had hoped for in the kind of love that is the foundation for marriage was nothing but an idealistic figment of my imagination.
Through my secretarial work for Miss Le Gallienne [Ed: Yes. THAT Miss La Gallienne. Eva La Galienne was a good friend and acting mentor to Madeleine.] I met a Hungarian refugee, a cultivated man who took me to the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall, introduced me to the music of Bruckner, which I found rather heavy, and to Hungarian fruit soups, which I found rather sweet. One evening he invited me to an elegant and expensive restaurant for dinner, and it was evident that this was to be a special evening. As we ate, he told me that he was married and that he and his wife loved each other. She was a winter-sports instructor and some kind of childhood trauma had made her incapable of normal sexual intercourse. In fact, whenever he attempted to consummate their marriage she had responded by throwing up. They had been to the finest therapists. It had nothing to do with him. It was her specific problem, no matter whom she was with. She fully understood his need for sexual fulfillment, but he had not found a suitable mistress since their flight to America. He assured me that he could put me up in a much nicer apartment than my beloved place on Tenth Street. He could get me an apartment on Park Avenue, give me a mink coat ...
I told him gently that I enjoyed his company but I did not think I was mistress material. After dinner he took me home, and I never saw him again.
Had I, once more, been incredibly naive to be totally taken aback by his proposal? I was badly shaken. As was my late-evening habit, I put Touche on her leash and walked over to Fifth Avenue, past Mark Twain's house, past the Marshall Chess Club, where the windows were still lit and I could see the silhouettes of men bent over chessboards. On the corner of Tenth and Fifth is Ascension Episcopal Church. It had been endowed with a fund to keep it open twenty-four hours a day. So I tied Touche in the vestibule and slipped into the back of the church to sit and think. Not so much to pray as to take time to be. It was a while, that evening, before I coudl stop my mind from its chaotic whirling.
Almost every night around midnight (for I kept theatre hours -- bed at 1 a.m., up at 10 a.m.), I slipped into the church. I would not have dreamed of going in during a church service. My parents' church had not done well by me. In my Anglican boarding school I was taught Anglican virtues, all self-protective: do not show emotion; do not grieve; do not ask for help; do it yourself. My father died when I was seventeen and no one told me that it was all right to cry. True to my tradition, I carried on, did all the brave things, and repressed my grief.
It was a long time before I learned that Anglican virtues and Anglican theology are barely compatible. But Ascension Church was a special place for me, part of my deepening, along with the piano, the books, and the typewriter, which had once been my father's.
Journal entries for those days were earnest. I was reading as many letters of the great writers as I could get hold of, and copying out the things that touched me closely. Knowing that I would soon be traveling with the Cherry Orchard company during the upcoming tour, I read deeply from Chekhov and learned much.
"You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don't let that concern you. It's your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, for failures...
"Something in me protests: reason and justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat ...
"The thought that I must, that I ought to write, never leave me for an instant."
And I added: Nor me.
The next day I wrote: "Today I sold 'Vicky' to Mademoisell magazine for $200." That was big money.
And I wrote down these words of Thoreau: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars."
On a hot summer evening I went with an actress friend from Uncle Harry to spend the night on her tugboat, anchored off the tip of Manhattan. We went into a dock-front bar, were the only ones there, and were treated to a long soliloquy by the owner, who delighted me by saying of one of his patrons, "He was so stingy he wouldn't pay a nickle to see the Statue of Liberty piss -- 'scuse my language."
As I recorded such small events in my journal I was, in effect, writing my own story. What we write down we tend not to forget, and that unique evening is as vivid to me now as it was then.
I quoted again (was it Chekhov?): "If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annhilation of self."
And from Plato: "He who having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple with the help of art -- he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted ...
"And there is the madness, too, of love, the greatest of Heaven's blessings."
Slowly I was learning who I was and who I wanted to be with the help of the great ones who had gone before me. Composers, too. After sitting at the piano I wrote: "The thing I love about Bach is the strength and simplicity and shape he gives to beauty. For most of us everything in the world seems to swirl around in an amorphous mass of confusion -- even the lovely parts of it. Bach takes its beauty -- which is somehow blurred in its looseness -- and subdues it to his own great and simple spirit.
"It seems to me that most of us don't know anything about life but its bare facts, and they're all pointless unless they're interpreted. I like the way Bach does it."
After an hour with the C-minor Toccata and Fugue I wrote about "Bach's immense and vital freedom within the tight boundaries of strict form. Perhaps that's why life doesn't drive one mad; it's interesting to see how alive and free one can remain within the limits that are always imposed on one and from which there can be no escape."
Life was not entirely "art". I was very aware of the precariousness of the world. I had lost several friends overseas in the war in Europe. What was even worse was seeing a man I had once known as an insouciant stagehand come home trembling, shaking inwardly and outwardly from the horrors he had witnessed on Okinawa.
I saw more of the unspeakably traumatic results of this war when I was asked to be in a Theatre Wing production of The Warrior's Husband. I played one of a dozen long-legged Amazons. Our theatres were Army and Navy hospitals, and then mental hospitals for men who had been shellshocked. These soulsick patients acted as stagehands for us, and we had been warned that they were apt to walk out if we didn't please them. But they liked The Warrior's Husband with its ebullience and humor -- and probably the almost entirely female and scantily attired cast.
After I had declined to be my Hungariant friend's mistress, I was more than ever convinced that marriage was not going to be part of my pattern. I would write, see friends, write, go to the theatre, write, but ultimately I was going to walk alone.
Nevertheless, I went out with several people. One was a handsome blond man with a great golden mustache, whose wife had abandoned him for a Spaniard, ironically enough named Julio, leaving him with the care of their preschool children. He was nicknamed Cap and he definitely purused me, and it is a human reaction to enjoy being pursued.
Cap was brought up in various capitals of Europe, a delicate, sensitive little boy. In many ways he never grew up, but he had charm and he kept calling me and taking me out. I was pretty forlorn at that time, and Cap was good for my amour-propre. I knew that he liked me; I thought he was handsome; we had a good deal in our backgrounds in common, and he was fun to go out with -- but I was completely taken aback when he asked me to marry him.
It was New Year's Eve. I had flu, and I was in bed, wearing a white flannel nightgown, with a piece of red flannel a doctor friend had ordered me to keep tied about my throat. I was lying in the dark, the lights out, in a cold room which a small fire in the fireplace did little to help. Shortly before midnight Cap arrived with a bottle of champagne and some food and then he told me that he was in love with me and wanted me to marry him.
I was fond of him. I wondered whether my ideal of what being in love was like might not be a mirage, and I finally agreed not to say no at once, but to wait six months before giving my answer. I knew long before the six months were over that I couldn't marry him. For one thing, he talked constantly, and it seemed to me that anyone who could love so vocally, who found it so necessary to reiterate out loud the depth of his passion, might not, in reality, be very deep.
But Cap would not take no for an answer. He refused to admit that I had ever mentioned the word "no". Or he would make scenes. Or send the children to climb in my lap, twine their arms about my neck, and tell me they wanted me for a mother -- and they were darling children. But the answer was no.
I remember Cap with affection and gratitude. He helped me regain my self-confidence at a period when it was at one of its lowest ebbs, and for this I owe him an eternal debt of gratitude.
May 24, 2005
The Books: "The Irrational Season" (Madeleine L'Engle)
Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:
Next book in my list of Madeleine L'Engle non-fiction:
The Irrational Season (The Crosswicks Journal, Book 3)
This is Part 3 in her Crosswicks Journals series. I love this book, too. (Uhm - can you tell I'm a Madeleine fan? I would literally read ANYTHING that she writes.) The Irrational Season takes, as its theme, Advent. She talks about Advent, what it means to her, etc., but of course - Advent is just the jumping off place for her to discuss so many other things. Mainly: her multiple roles in life: as mother, wife, grandmother, writer. It's a contemplative book, sure, but it's also chock-full of great stories.
The following excerpt details her long marriage to actor Hugh Franklin. What I love so much about it is that - she and Hugh - both artists (and both highly successful in their chosen fields) had to create their OWN type of marriage, what would work for THEM, because they were not 9 to 5 people, they were not going to lead lives like that. So ... what to do? Should they be upset, and try to fit their square pegs into round holes? It took a lot of doing, but their marriage was an organic one, something created. It's an ideal of mine. I particularly enjoy the anecdote below where Madeleine describes the minor battle at the hospital, after giving birth, about "the 6 a.m. feeding".
EXCERPT FROM The Irrational Season (The Crosswicks Journal, Book 3)
I realize how fortunate I was in the terms with which I started my marriage; I had had one novel published; the second was already in galleys; I had made a good start as a professional writer. When Hugh asked me to marry him, and talked about children, I said that I, too, wanted children, but that he had to understand that I couldn ot stop writing, that he was marrying me as a writer, marrying all of me, not just the part of me which would bear his children. And I rather naively told him that writing takes a lot of time, and that I would be glad to do the cooking but he'd have to do the dishes.
The division hasn't been that straight down the line, but we've always shared household chores, and we have also shared the nurture of our babies. Hugh showed a generosity and understanding as rare then as it is now when he accepted me on these terms, and never expected me to be only an appendage, an et ux. I have never had to struggle against my husband to be me. This doesn't mean that we haven't had struggles and conflicts in our marriage -- we have -- but they have been in different areas.
It is the nature of love to create, and Hugh and I did want to make babies together. In my conception of love, something always has to be created during the act of intercourse, but this something may be simply a strengthening of love, a love which is participation, not possession. Daniel Day Williams, in The Spirit and the Forms of Love, was the one to bring to my attention the idea of love which is participatory, and not long after I had read this book I was able to talk with him about it, and was taught even more. Just as our friendship was a'birthing he died, and I look forward to learning more from him in heaven.
Too often, love is seen in terms of possession, and this destroys marriage. Until Hugh and I started our first baby, our love-making was a discovery of each other, was creating this strange new creature, a marriage.
I'm glad that I'm a human mother, and not a sea horse; the sea horse might well be a symbol for the more extreme branches of women's lib, because the female sea horse lays her eggs in the male's pouch, and then he has to carry the eggs to term, go through labor pains, and bear the babies.
I don't understand why some women consider childbearing a humiliation; it's an extraordinary act of creativity, and men suffer a great deprivation in being barred by their very nature form this most creative of all experiences. But there's a price on it, as with all good things, especially for a woman who feels called to do something as well as being wife and mother.
I actively enjoyed the whole magnificent process of having children, the amazing months of pregnancy when suddenly one becomes aware that one is carrying life, that a new human being is being created. While I was carrying Josephine, our first-born, I felt quickening while I was in an eye-and-ear hospital with a recurring eye problem; a young nurse happened to come into my room as I felt the first small flutterings, and i cried, "I think I feel the baby!" She ran to the bed and put her hand on my belly, and her joy in feeling the new life was almost as great as my own. From then on, there was a lovely procession of nurses and doctors coming to feel the baby; the quickening of life is something which doesn't often happen in an eye-and-ear hospital.
I find the birthing of babies even more fantastic. And here I feel profoundly that the husband should be given the privilege of being with his wife during the birth, that he should not be excluded. [Ed: This book was published in 1977] This didn't happen with Hugh and me until our son, Bion, was born in a small New England village, and delivered by an old-fashioned general practitioner. Hugh was with me to rub my back during pains, to hold my hand, suddenly to see the crowning of his son. Our first baby was born in a big New York hospital, delivered by an eminent obstetrician, and I spent hours left alone and in pain and afraid. It's enough to make the whole process seem degrading.
And nursing: I loved nursing my babies, but when Josephine was born, nursing was not yet popular again in New York City; it's more trouble for the nurses, and I had to fight for the right to nurse my baby: "But nobody nurses babies nowadays." "I do."
My husband's theatre hours are definitely not nine to five. I had seen other young wives up at six with the baby, and unable to manage to be awake and ready to listen and talk when their husbands got home from the theatre, and I was determined that this was not going to happen with us. Our baby was a strong, healthy specimen, so while I was still in the hospital, the head nurse told me that they had decided that the baby didn't need the 2 a.m. feeding and they were going to cut it out. "But my husband's an actor and we're up at 2 a.m. Let's cut the 6 a.m. feeding." This wasn't hospital procedure at all, and I had my first hospital fight to be a human being and not a cog in routine. I was told in no uncertain terms that it was the 2 a.m. feeding which would be cut. I replied in equally certain terms that if my baby was brought to me at 6 a.m. I would turn my breasts to the wall. I won.
I had made a choice. Why should a man come home at all if his wife isn't awake and available? I had seen other actors go to the local bar instead of coming home to a dark apartment. This choosing the structure of our day was not being an unliberated woman. I chose it for my own pleasure, too; I enjoyed this time with my husband; it was no sacrifice. And I profoundly disbelieve in the child-centered household. What happens to the parents when it is time for the children to leave the nest if all of life has been focused on the fledglings?
May 23, 2005
The Books: "The Summer of the Great-Grandmother" (Madeleine L'Engle)
Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:
We're in the Madeleine L'Engle memoir section. Next book is:
The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
Madeleine L'Engle has four books out in a series that she calls The Crosswicks Journal, and The Summer of the Great-Grandmother is Part 2 of that series. Crosswicks is her house in Connecticut. This book is about the summer that Madeleine took care of her mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer's. It's a very sad book - but also redemptive and inspirational, too.
Here is the opening of this book:
EXCERPT FROM The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
This is the summer of the great-grandmother, more her summer than any other summer. This is the summer after her ninetieth birthday, the summer of the swift descent.
Once, when I was around twelve, we took a twenty-mile toboggan ride down a Swiss mountainside. The men guiding the toboggan were experienced mountaineers; the accelerating speed was wildly exciting. Mother and I both clutched the sides of the toboggan as we careened around sharply banked curves. The guides could keep it on the hard-packed snow of the path, but they could not stop it in its descent. My mother's plunge into senility reminds me of that toboggan ride.
When I look at the long green and gold days of this summer, the beautiful days are probably more beautiful, and the horrible days more horrible, than in actuality. But there's no denying that it's a summer of extremes.
It might be said with some justification that all our summers are summers of extremes, because when the larger family gathers together we are a group of opinionated, noisily articulate, varied and variable beings. It is fortunate for us all that Crosswicks is a largish two-hundred-and-some-year-old farmhouse; even so, when four generations worth of strong-willed people assemble under one roof, the joints of the house seem to creak in an effort to expand. If we all strive toward moderation, it is beccause we, like the ancient Greeks, are natively immoderate.
This is our fourth four-generation summer. Four Junes ago Mother's namesake and first great-grandchild, Madeleine, was born. We call her Lena, to avoid confusion in this house of Madeleines. Charlotte, the second great-granddaughter, was born fourteen months later. My mother is very proud of being the Great-grandmother.
But she is hardly the gentle little old lady who sits by the fireside and knits. My knowledge of her is limited by my own chronology; I was not around for nearly forty years of her life, and her pre-motherhood existetnce was exotic and adventurous; in the days before planes she traveled by camel and donkey; she strode casually through a world which is gone and which I will never see except through her eyes. The woman I have experienced only as loving and gentle mother has, for the past several years, been revealing new and demanding facets. When she wants something she makes her desires known in no uncertain terms, and she's not above using her cane as a weapon. She gathers puppies and kittens into her lap; she likes her bourbon before dinner; she's a witty raconteur; and the extraordinary thing about her descent into senility is that there are occasionaly wild, brilliant flashes which reveal more of my mother-Madeleine than I ever knew when she was simply my mother.
But she is my mother; there is this indisputable, biological fact which blocks my attempt at objectivity. I love her, and the change in her changes me, too.
May 19, 2005
The Books: "A Circle of Quiet" (Madeleine L'Engle)
Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:
I keep all of L'Engle's books together ... but the next book is no longer strictly a religious book ... It's the beginning of her "memoir" series - The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet
Madeleine L'Engle has four books out in a series that she calls The Crosswicks Journal, and Circle of Quiet is Part 1 of that series. Crosswicks is her house in Connecticut. The book is kind of a jumble of her thoughts, reminiscinces, memories ... It's also a bit biographical, of course - but she writes movingly about her journey towards being the writer she is today. I am always moved when I read about the 10 year period of rejection slips. She wrote and wrote and wrote for 10 years - 10 YEARS - with no success. It was not easy. She speaks of wanting to give up many many times. Finally, she had written this old book called Wrinkle in Time - but publisher after publisher rejected it. It was too odd, too unclassifiable ... could this be a children's book? No. No. No. No. Finally - a brave publisher (Farrar, Straus Giroux) accepted it. They took a chance. The book, obviously became a runaway success, winning every medal in sight, and launched Madeleine's career as a well-known and beloved author. She had written and published books before Wrinkle, but they didn't really have an impact. They're good books, I've read them all ... but Wrinkle is extraordinary.
Anyway, enough preamble. The following excerpt talks about her struggles with the copyeditors working on Wrinkle, who kept trying to iron out her punctuation, "correcting" certain things that were very deliberate on Madeleine's part.
(I guess I didn't realize that "grey" was the English spelling. I have always spelled the word that way, and for exactly the same reasons. As a person who loves rainy days, and loves foggy days on the beach ... "grey" calls up those images. "Gray" calls up concrete, cement. So I always use "grey".)
EXCERPT FROM A Circle of Quiet
Copy editors, except the present one at FS&G, who is an artist herself, are apt to monkey around with punctuation. You have to watch them like a hawk.
When A Wrinkle in Time went into galleys, the copy editor -- I'm glad I haven't the faintest idea who it was -- had him/herself a ball. First of all, I do spell the English way; I was in an English boarding school when I was twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, and these are the years when spelling gets set. After I had been made to write h-o-n-o-u-r, for instance, a hundred times on a blackboard several hundred times, it was almost impossible for me to spell it h-o-n-o-r. The English use t-o-w-a-r-d-s and we use t-o-w-a-r-d. I like to use them both, depending on the rhythm of the sentence and the letter which begins the following word; sometimes the s is needed; sometimes not: this is, I realize, rather erratic, and I can't blame the copy editor who tries to talk me out of it. Then there's grey, which is English, and one very definite, bird-wing, ocean-wave color to me; and gray, which is American, and a flatter, more metallic color. Then there are the c and s words, such as practice or practise. Abour words like these I'm simply in a state of confusion, rather than aesthetic persuasion, as with grey or towards, and the copy editor can have his way. On the whole I tell the copy editor to go ahead and make the spelling American, but don't muck around with the punctuation.
The worst thing the copy editor did with A Wrinkle in Time was with the three strange Mrs Ws. Now, Mr and Mrs are usually spelled Mr and Mrs in England, and Mr. and Mrs. in America. Usually I spell them the American way, or try to remember to. But the Mrs W were extra-special as well as extra-terrestrial, and I very deliberately did not put the period after their Mrs's. With Mr. and Mrs. Murry, who, scientists or no, were solid earth folk, I did put in the period. It was important to me. It was, I should have thought, obvious that it was done with forethought, but the copy editor went through the manuscript and put a period after every Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which.
When I got the galleys I was appalled. I called my editor and told him what had happened. He was sorry, though certainly it was not a matter of vital import to him, as it was to me. He said, "If you insist, we'll take the periods out, but it will cost a fortune." If I insisted I would be acting like an impossible and temperamental author (I am convinced that I am the most gentle, pliable, easily managed author-wife-mother who ever walked the earth), and my editors would not be pleased. And they were taking a risk on a book that almost every other publisher in the business had turned down, and I was more than grateful. So I didn't insist. But it bothered me (and it still does).
When the book was done in England, at last I was able to get the punctuation the way I wanted it: joy! though (temperamental author again?) I wasn't wholly satisfied on two counts: the publishers thought the book was too long for English children, and a few cuts were made; they weren't disastrous, but I think they shouldn't have been made; everything that could be cut had already been cut out before the original publication. Then, I was asked if I would mind if the setting of the story were identified as being in America. I replied that I didn't think it was very important, but if they felt it to be essential, go ahead.
The first sentence of the book is very carefully and deliberately that old war-horse:
It was a dark and stormy night.
Period. End of sentence. End of paragraph.
The English edition begins, "It was a dark and stormy night in a small village in the United States."
I was naturally delighted when Penguin Publications decided to make a Puffin book out of it. But lo, the Puffin copy editor took the periods out after Mr. and Mrs. Murry, too.
Ah, well.
May 3, 2005
The Books: "Gift from the sea" (Anne Morrow Lindberg)
Next book on the shelf for my Daily Book Excerpt:
We're still in Bookshelf # 3 - where I keep my oversized books, hardcovers, picture books ... The following book is a classic in women's literature. Practically required reading! It's one of my beloved books, and I found a beautiful hardcover copy at The Strand - and it's illustrated with watercolors. The book is Gift from the Sea
This strikes me as rather extraordinary, and a very cool solution. How many couples do you see in life who don't enjoy their vacations, because it's only one partner having a good time? The Lindberghs broke from that silly tradition, and did their own thing.
Gift from the Sea is the story of one of her solitary vacations - in a house on the beach, by herself.
EXCERPT FROM Gift from the Sea
The beach is not the place work; to read, write or think. I should have remembered that from other years. Too warm, too damp, too soft for any real mental discipline or sharp flights of spirit. One never learns. Hopefully, one carries down the faded straw bag, lumpy with books, clean paper, long over-due unanswered letters, freshly sharpened pencils, lists, and good intentions. The books remain unread, the pencils break their points, and the pads rest smooth and unblemished as the cloudless sky. No reading, no writing, no thoughts even -- at least not at first.
At first, the tired body takes over completely. As on shipboard, one descends into a deck-chair apathy. One is forced against one's mind, against all tidy resolutions, back into the primeval rhythms of the sea-shore. Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's tides of all yesterday's scribblings.
And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense -- no -- but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut.
But it must not be sought for or -- heaven forbid! -- dug for. No, no dredging of the seabottom here. That would defeat one's purpose. The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. 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.