Gift from the sea
- New York Pantheon 1955
- 127p.
This is Anne Morrow Lindbergh's first book in eleven years. Her reflections on a woman's life were matured in these active years of family living and stimulated by conversa tions with men and women who experience the same problems and feel the same need for assessing the true values of life.
The setting of her book is the sea shore; the time, a brief vacation which had lifted her from the distractions of everyday exist ence into the sphere of meditation. As the sea tosses up its gifts-shells rare and perfect -so the mind, left to its ponderings, brings up its own treasures of the deep. And the shells become symbols here for the various aspects of life she is contemplating.
In a blend of complete sincerity and deli cacy, so uniquely her own, Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares with the reader her aware ness of the many frustrating elements we face today: the restlessness, the unending pressures and demands, the denial of leisure and silence, the threat to inner peace and in tegration, the uneasy balance of the oppo sites, man and woman. With radiant lucidity she makes visible again the values of the in ner life, without which there is no true ful fillment. She does this without the overtones of preaching, but herself as a seeker, echo ing-only clearer and stronger-our own small still voice. who was then on a pioneering flight through Central and South America. They became engaged the next year, and were married in May, 1929.
In the years following her marriage, Anne Morrow Lindbergh learned to pilot a plane, and was the first woman in America to obtain a glider-pilot's license. She studied dead reckoning and celestial navigation, and accom panied her husband as a radio operator on the survey flights to explore air routes to Asia and Europe. Her experi ences on these flights are described in her first two books, North to the Orient and Listen! the Wind. Her third book on flying, The Steep Ascent, is a fic tional account of an actual incident which occurred over the Alps, on a trip to India the couple took in 1937.
Anne Lindbergh's writing, which in cludes both poetry and prose, has been carried on in the hours she could glean from an active life as wife and mother. The Lindbergh family has grown until there are now places for six children at a full dinner table-Jon and his wife Barbara, Land, Anne, Scott, and Reeve. The thoughts in this book are wound about the sea, a beach, and an island. These same elements have wound about Anne Lindbergh's life-flying over seas, walking along beaches, liv ing on islands .