From my bookshelf

I am reading Against Wind and Tide, from the letters and journals of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I revel at how prolific a writer she was (several books of letters and diaries over her lifetime) and am enchanted by her reflections and insights. (Writing it all by hand? oh my gosh. I can't even imagine.) We share the same feelings quite often, but I suspect it is because she mirrors much of what women as a whole think upon.  

It is the compromise with the world that is so hard. The other day I was thinking of all the conflicts one lives in the midst of every day - real conflicts below superficial issues. I want a quiet and peaceful and serene living room - and I have five children with no very good place to play and no desire to starch them in discipline. I want to be pure in heart - but I like to wear my purple dress. I want to live so quietly that the flight of live swans over y head is an occasion for a hymn and yet I want to go out in the world and meet people. One cannot be half-monk. 

I am not a sappy gal, for  the good or bad of that. But, (and not to say it is sappy) her earlier work, Gifts from the Sea - still in print - meant a very lot to me as I wrestled with a painful time in my life after the sudden death of my young husband. She and a few other eloquent writers (and quite excellent friends) helped me through it. Good books and good authors and good friends do that, don't they? I am beholden to them.

I don't like Charles much, though.

This lengthy obit summed her up quite eloquently.

And from the introduction by Reeve Lindbergh, her daughter:

The material collected...was written between my mother's fortieth birthday and her eightieth, and follow a period of substantial growth in her life and thought, as well as some marked changes in her relationship with her husband and in her sense of who she was as a woman and an artist....as a writer she was honest, eloquent, and deeply reflective, always seeking to understand life as it unfolded before her, always wanting to share her understanding with others....she struggled with issues women and men have to face in every era: what to make of a complex, difficult marriage...how to reconcile the impulse toward creativity and the need to work with the practical demands of home and family; how to respond to the larger events and issues of the day; how to give and receive friendship and love throughout a lifetime; how to meet old age and the certainty of death, first the death of those we love and cannot bear to lose...and then one's own old age and inevitable death, the end of life.