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Against Wind And Tide: Letters And Journals, 1947-1986 (2012)

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh(Favorite Author)

4.05 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0307907147 (ISBN13: 9780307907141)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Pantheon

review 1: It's startling to read the rest of the story, after years of being intimately familiar with her first five volumes of her diaries and letters. The last volume, War Within and Without, had been published in 1980. Now the rest of her story, in her own words, has been released from the contents of letters and journals from the second half of her life.Although Gift from the Sea is her most famous book, North to the Orient, Listen! the Wind, and all the volumes of her journals are well worth reading. She was an introspective, bookish person who led an adventurous, daring life, and willingly risked that life on her exploring trips with her husband in the earliest years of commercial aviation. She did things like get shot off the side of a mountain in a glider, in a spot where no... more one had ever glided before, while pregnant. She was navigator and co-pilot on exploring flights in the most remote parts of the world. And the remarkable thing is those were not the most noteworthy things she did, because her writing surpasses all that. The wonderful thing about someone like her going on such adventures is that it gave her unexpected subjects to write about, which she did magnificent justice to. Her descriptions of flying are often noted as some of the finest writing about the subject, ever. She and Antoine de St.-Exupery, her dear friend, are still held up together as unsurpassed in their descriptions of flying.She's one of my favorite writers, and one of those people you feel you know once you've read her books. To me, the impression her writing gives is one of an effortless style, a natural and nuanced feel for language, and a fine-tuned sense of humor. To read her is to be inside the mind of someone who thinks deeply about her life, and understands and comes to terms with it through the consolations in nature, art, and literature. She went through enough to need every consolation and inspiration she could find. Her gift to us is leaving behind her pattern for living, the transmutation of the stuff of her life into literature, which can be read as a kind of guide for how to live a life of grace in a crucible of greater pressures than most of us will ever know.
review 2: Decades before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was living “the problem that has no name,” pondering why she in particular, and American women in general, were so unhappy about their roles in American society.I spent my teens in the 1950s, that decade after the war when gender norms clamped down so hard on women, worried about what I could do with my life “besides get married.” In 1958, after spending my entire education in the same all-female schools that Lindbergh attended (Chapin and Smith), I took myself on a “husband hunt,” travelling alone to Europe so that I could have first dibs on any suitable young man who might come along. I had no success in England and France, but on the student ship coming home I met an incredibly feminist young man (“I’ve always wanted to meet a woman who was getting her Ph.D!”) whom I married in 1960. And guess what I packed to read on our beach honeymoon? Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea.Though I took it at first as a vacation book about beaches and shells, I was fascinated by what she had to say about a woman’s need for time alone away from her family and about how a good marriage could flourish if husbands and wives carved out separate niches for themselves. Henry and I talked long into the starry nights at the beach about the possibilities for an “equal marriage” with “equal careers” as college professors; wonder of wonders, we did it, though we wound up commuting between universities in different states for twenty years.The period after the war was difficult for Anne Morrow Lindbergh, determined to preserve her selfhood and her marriage when her husband was often absent for months at a time, leaving her entirely responsible for their household of five young children. Trying to get through each day and keep afloat “against wind and tide,” she wryly recasts her marriage vows from the perspective of twenty years later, recounting what it is really like to “have it all,” juggling children (she had five after the kidnapping of her first child, as well as two miscarriages), marriage and career, struggling with household chores and solitary parental responsibility in the middle of one family crisis after anotherNo wonder so many of these entries have a tone of puzzled sadness. “Is it this then that happens to women—especially feminine ones? Physically, they are so made that they want to spill it all away. And all their natural ties as a woman demand that they spill it… and not without terrible conflict—which is exhausting in itself. I work against myself all the time. I try to give as a woman over & over. I want to. I prefer to…” 1948This was written on Captiva Island in Florida, during the genesis of Gift From the Sea as she reconsidered her life in her forties. When it became a best seller, she was both troubled and fascinated by the way women readers reacted: “Among other things they respond to is my period of unhappiness or discontent with being a woman…This discontent corresponds to the general malaise of the American woman with being a woman. I don’t know enough to understand this profound malaise in this country of why it has become so wide, but I think it has to do with the fiercely competitive nature of our culture—certainly with the competitive struggle in America between the sexes.” 1955Lindbergh has a gift for understanding stages of life that no one else finds interesting—A Gift from the Sea rises out of the moil and welter of middle life with a house full of children and a difficult and often absent husband; in later entries she examines what it is like to be a widow and to endure the limits of aging, problems in women’s lives which also “have no names.” For example, she writes how disappointed she is with herself when, getting on into her seventies, she can no longer summon up the energy for a new grandchild that she had devoted to earlier ones. I have felt the same sadness, and her entry hit me right between the eyes.Near the end of the collection there is a marvelous speech where she uses the children’s game of “Musical Chairs” as a metaphor for her “pilgrim’s progress through life” a journey which“is neither straight nor easy. It is full of stops and starts, stumbles and jerks, and sudden confused standstills. . . Glimpses of insight seem not come not when we are moving ahead in the procession, but in the jerks and stops. . All at once the music stops and you drop out of the procession…the pattern changes, you are left standing alone…It is always a surprise and a readjustment. . at each halt there is a moment of hesitation, even of panic, then a re-evaluation. At each new start, there are new glimpses of insight and other tasks and rewards.” 1981She devotes the rest of the speech to living alone after widowhood, approaching her eighties. I am in this same stage, and I found her analysis cogent, though it’s not a pretty scenario. As so many times in your life, you are up against a deadline, but this time it’s not just for getting a project finished. It’s the last deadline of all, and there is no time left to waste. Here are some time wasters she warns against:• Perfectionism• Clutter• Trying to live by other people’s standards (“By the time one reaches a certain age one should be able, as Marianne Moore said, ‘to have the courage of one’s peculiarities.’”)But this “third age,” as she calls it, has “enrichments and enlargements”: • Work still open to us, of only for two hours a day before we get tired• Fewer distractions• Ever deeper enjoyment of the outer world of nature• Enjoyment of grandchildren, from whom you demand less than you did of your own children• Listening to your friends; being less inhibited (“One is less shy”)• Becoming reconciled to one’s lossesLindbergh had tremendous sorrow in her life, with a lot of joy mixed in. In her diaries she speaks to you the way she spoke to herself as she crafted a painfully won self-understanding; her letters to her friends are rich with compassionate helpfulness and down-to-earth practicality. Should you think that reading the papers of a woman whose experiences took place such a long time ago couldn’t have much relevance for present times, you will be surprised to find in her a wise, gentle, and wryly insightful guide to the coming phases of your life. less

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