Book Review: Gift from the Sea

[osprey_archer]

I’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.”

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Accepting change and not seeking permanence is a challenge for me, too, but I do feel like I want to love things even though they change, and accept change. It's hard though. I've found, though, that even if I do manage to cling to something super hard, it just changes *anyway*, and what I'm clinging to turns out, when I look, to be no long the thing I'd started out clutching. This is equally true of autumn leaves and of relationships.

So yeah, I definitely do believe that friendships don't have to last forever to have been true at one time--but I also believe that friendships *can* last forever, but if they do, that they evolve over time, just like romantic relationships, or relationships with parents or siblings.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

For me it would depend on why a relationship ended. "We got close due to shared interests, then we both developed different interests and drifted apart" doesn't send a retroactive shadow over the relationship like "she stabbed me in the back for no reason I understand, sent me a vicious break-up letter, and lied to all our mutual friends about me."

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think Lindbergh is talking much more about the first sort of situation. In some ways it's an odd book, because it's basically about coping with a happy life - how often does anyone think of a happy life as something that needs to be coped with? But I guess everyone needs coping mechanisms.