The Books: “Gift From the Sea” (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

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, and it’s by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Every year she and her husband, Charles, would take separate vacations. It soon became clear, after a couple years of marriage, that although they loved each other – their interests were very different. What a vacation meant to Charles was very different from what one meant to Anne – and vice versa. So rather than Charles having to suffer through her version of relaxation, or Anne having to suffer through his – they went their separate ways, every year, to have vacations alone.

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, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

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.