Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Author:Anne Morrow Lindbergh [Lindbergh, Anne Morrow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80517-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

Is it such a sin? In discussing this verse with an Indian philosopher, I had an illuminating answer. “It is all right to wish to be loved alone,” he said, “mutuality is the essence of love. There cannot be others in mutuality. It is only in the time-sense that it is wrong. It is when we desire continuity of being loved alone that we go wrong.” For not only do we insist on believing romantically in the “one-and-only”—the one-and-only love, the one-and-only mate, the one-and-only mother, the one-and-only security—we wish the “one-and-only” to be permanent, ever-present and continuous. The desire for continuity of being-loved-alone seems to me “the error bred in the bone” of man. For “there is no one-and-only,” as a friend of mine once said in a similar discussion, “there are just one-and-only moments.”

The one-and-only moments are justified. The return to them, even if temporarily, is valid. The moment over the marmalade and muffins is valid; the moment feeding the child at the breast is valid; the moment racing with him later on the beach is valid. Finding shells together, polishing chestnuts, sharing one’s treasures:—all these moments of together-aloneness are valid, but not permanent.

One comes in the end to realize that there is no permanent pure-relationship and there should not be. It is not even something to be desired. The pure relationship is limited, in space and in time. In its essence it implies exclusion. It excludes the rest of life, other relationships, other sides of personality, other responsibilities, other possibilities in the future. It excludes growth. The other children are there clamoring outside the closed nursery door. One loves them too. The telephone rings in the next room. One also wants to talk to friends. When the muffins are cleared away, one must think of the next meal or the next day. These are realities too, not to be excluded. Life must go on. That does not mean it is a waste of time to recreate for brief holiday periods together-alone experiences. On the contrary, these one-and-only moments are both refreshing and rewarding. The light shed over the small breakfast table illumines the day, many days. The race on the beach together renews one’s youth like a dip in the sea. But we are no longer children; life is not a beach. There is no pattern here for permanent return, only for refreshment.

One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth. All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms. But there is no single fixed form to express such a changing relationship. There are perhaps different forms for each successive stage; different shells I might put in a row on my desk to suggest the different stages of marriage—or indeed of any relationship.

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