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Book Review: Gift from the Sea
Feb. 21st, 2016 10:04 amI’ve been dipping into Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea over the last few days, reading it slowly and leaving a bristling porcupine path of bookmarks through the book: quotes that I want to remember. I think it’s a good book, and an important book, although perhaps not a book that I needed at this very moment: it’s about finding solitude in a life that has grown too hectic, even if hectic with much-beloved things - “For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures - an excess of shells, where one or two would be sufficient.”
The shells are a metaphor for stages in life, relationships in life; really any part of life that you can imagine becomes embodied in shells. Lindberg wrote the book while staying in a cabin on the beach, and the rhythm of the waves creeps into her writing.
“We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, and 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, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.”
If her major theme doesn’t feel applicable to my life right now (I have too much solitude, oceans of solitude), then this sub-theme of ebb and flow and continuity through change and living in the moment probably is: “One must accept the security of the wingèd life, of ebb and flow, and intermittency.” Other kinds of security are ultimately illusory.
Or this quote, which I have been chewing over since I read it, because I’m not sure if I believe it - and I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t believe it’s true, or if I do, but don’t want to. How true is a friendship that has no durability in the face of adversity?
But, on the other hand, perhaps a friendship doesn’t need to last forever to have been true at one time.
“Duration is not a test of true or false… Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. It relates to the actual moment in time and place… The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.”
The shells are a metaphor for stages in life, relationships in life; really any part of life that you can imagine becomes embodied in shells. Lindberg wrote the book while staying in a cabin on the beach, and the rhythm of the waves creeps into her writing.
“We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, and 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, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.”
If her major theme doesn’t feel applicable to my life right now (I have too much solitude, oceans of solitude), then this sub-theme of ebb and flow and continuity through change and living in the moment probably is: “One must accept the security of the wingèd life, of ebb and flow, and intermittency.” Other kinds of security are ultimately illusory.
Or this quote, which I have been chewing over since I read it, because I’m not sure if I believe it - and I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t believe it’s true, or if I do, but don’t want to. How true is a friendship that has no durability in the face of adversity?
But, on the other hand, perhaps a friendship doesn’t need to last forever to have been true at one time.
“Duration is not a test of true or false… Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. It relates to the actual moment in time and place… The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.”
