Scott’s Cove
April 5th, 1968
Dear Scott,
Your father and I came home last night from dinner at Fairfield Osborne’s (head of the Natural History Museum, an old man but tremendously vigorous and alert and gay—a scientist and writer and great human being) where, mid-evening, we heard the shocking news of Martin Luther King’s assassination, a great tragedy for Negroes and whites alike in our country—possibly a tragedy with even more ominous implications than the murder of Kennedy. We came home to read your letter to Father and your letter addressed to me but written to both of us, about your marriage to Alika† and your plans for life in Europe, and your immediate attitude toward the draft.
Your letters were gentle and sincere and direct and I am grateful that you wrote us this way. I suppose it is inevitable that they were also somewhat of a shock. It is not that I have not had some preparation for your marriage by meeting Alika, and it is not that I did not like her. As I told you, I found her sympathetic and, from those brief meetings, had the sense that she was warm, generous, intuitive and devoted.
I know that Alika has supported you loyally in your work and life. I am grateful to her for that. I remember how terribly lonely you were in the midst of your conflicts and problems last summer on the draft and citizenship. Now you have Alika and feel less lonely. Although loneliness is really not “cured,” it is only covered up, filled temporarily. And I am not sure we should try so hard to cure it or cover it up. Loneliness, if one comes to terms with it, is one’s good daemon: out of it come one’s creative powers—and you have those, though they have not yet had the opportunity to express themselves. Alika, being a creative person herself, will, I hope, understand this—the need for loneliness. I hope you can protect each other’s loneliness; it is precious.
I hope you will be happy, and I hope you will grow, and that the confining world of scholarship and a small circle of like-minded people will crack and open up for you so that you are liberated to ever-widening work and worlds and people.
We have just come back from Hawaii, a world in which I thought a great deal of you. It is freer, wilder, and less overlaid than the U.S. or Europe: very beautiful—still expanses of wild land to ranch or farm, still opportunities for new research; some of the rawness (but not the crudeness) of the Old West; isolated from the rest of the world, an island culture and civilization tinged with a fragrance of the Orient—not a heavy fragrance, though; washed by sea winds, fresher. Like Mexico, it seemed to me one of those rare blends of the primitive and the cultured. A man could start a new life there, I felt. We have done the best we could to ruin Honolulu, Waikiki Beach, etc. But there are still unspoiled islands. (No wonder Gregory Bateson wants to work there.)*
There is also, surprisingly, little color discrimination. Hawaii is a mixture of Polynesian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. and missionaries and whaler stock. People of all colors and mixtures (no Negro) walk the streets unself-consciously, with grace and pride. Life is informal, out of doors, healthy. A love of beauty and music, characteristics of the early Polynesians from Tahiti, still hangs over the islands, as I said, like a fragrance.
Don’t try to answer this. There isn’t much to say. Ansy will give me your news. We will miss you at Reeve’s wedding but she may go abroad in August—
Love,
Mother
Scott’s Cove, Darien, Conn.
May 20th, 1968
Dear Florida Scott-Maxwell,†
I have just written Mrs. Jones‡ of Knopf to thank her for sending me your last book, The Measure of My Days, and to tell her of my great admiration for it. I am painfully aware of how inadequate my letter was to express what I felt, and how inadequate this one to you will also be. And yet I must try. In a way there is a kind of comfort in the inadequacy; it lets me understand better why I have been so appallingly silent over the years since I saw you. Not a word to you to show how much I have thought of you and carried your words and ideas around with me and shared them with others. As one gets older, I now realize, one goes deeper and it becomes increasingly difficult to plumb the depths and put the findings on paper.
But, the fact is, you have done it in this little book. You have brought up things from the depths, clarified, ordered, and put them into a form that can reach us, simply, vividly, beautifully. They are not tortured or strained, like thoughts that have been struggled for, or tangled and confused like unripe ideas, but whole, bare, beautiful, like something organic—shells or branches of coral, perfect in their growth and completion, rescued from the dark sea bottom.
They speak—as all you have written does—to my condition, but much, much more. You are speaking here not simply to the old, or to women, but to men and women, young and old, to anyone in any society or culture who is aware of the struggle of man’s spirit toward maturity and wholeness. You speak, you say, from a restricted circle, but you seem much closer to humanity’s struggles than when you last spoke. If this is what it is to be old, it is to be at the pulse of life. But few reach it at any age.
I am not being irresponsibly enthusiastic. I will try to be more explicit. When I opened the package from Knopf, I had a leap of joy to see a new book of yours, and with your card in it for me, as if my long silence had been understood and forgiven. Since it came, I have been reading it with excitement, each night, always before going to sleep, and sometimes waking sleepless in the middle of the night (my favorite hour for reading the I Ching at random), or at dawn. I have not been able to refrain from reading passages out loud to my husband (at decent hours only!), especially those passages on differentiation and the conflict between quality and equality. He was arrested and said: “Mark that, I want to read it again. I have never heard it as well expressed. This is a truth very few people see, and almost no women.” (I could not share your other writings with him. He could not hear them. Perhaps they were too directed to women, or the inner life.) This is a new dimension in your writing, as well as, perhaps, a new dimension in us.
Then, unable to leave it behind, I took your book to town, to a gathering of late middle-aged women who have been meeting for ten years or so, to read and discuss philosophical, religious, and psychological books (Jung, Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, Tillich, Buber, Teilhard de Chardin, Suzuki, Benoit, etc., as well as your book and articles). I read aloud that wonderful passage on page 39—starting “Personal immortality may not matter at all” and going on to “our whole duty may be to clarify and increase what we are, to make our consciousness a finer quality.” And then I read the passage on page 120 starting “There is a word I have never found,” which goes on to “the sacred identity within us” to protect which is “our chief aim.” They were all silent at the end, the silence not only of affirmation but of confirmation. This is what we all, facing the last twenty years of our lives, feel to be true. You have confirmed it in expressing the almost inexpressible.
Tomorrow I have to write a note to one of our group, the oldest, about eighty, who must have a serious operation. What can I say that will have any relevance? I found it in your notebook, the passage on the equal-ended cross surrounded by a circle (page 45). “Does Life, or God, what is the difference, build us with accepted experience, stab by stab of accepted understanding? As though each joy or sorrow is God, or life, saying, ‘You See?’ and we are needed, not forced, to say truly, ‘I see.’ ” Coming from you, it will be a hand to hold in the dark.
Do not reply to this mammoth letter. It would be much too tiring. You must know that your book is like a long rich letter that friends feel like answering. I may perhaps write you again, now I have broken the ice-jam. Letters can be put aside for a quiet moment or a dull one. As we used to say of nondescript birthday presents, at least it’s “something to open.”
I am writing another book, too, slowly and heavily, with many interruptions and much discouragement. However, reading your book has given me new heart to go on. One must always write the truth, Dr. Johnson says somewhere, “It saves mankind from despair.” This yo
u have done.
Darien, Conn.
November 11th, 1968
Dear Leonard Bernstein,
I felt badly that we could not go backstage at the end of the magnificent concert Friday night that I went to with Evie Ames—to at least shake your hand. I would not have been able to say anything of what I felt, I am afraid.
The evening of Mahler songs, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s voice and your playing was a deeply moving experience. I have never witnessed before such a perfect meeting of poetry, music and artistic performance. The result was an extraordinary sense of distillation—as if down to one flower, one person, one experience—a very personal and private experience in the midst of that great hall and that crowd of people. One was alone with the most profound feelings in life: joy, beauty, love, separation, sorrow. And yet, of course, as with all creative acts, the private experience was resolved, accepted, transfigured in the perfection of the art.
This is something I could not thank you for with a handshake—or very well even with a note, but I had to try to say some of it.
Gratefully, Anne Lindbergh
En route NY → Seattle
January 25th, 1969
Dear Lucia and Alan [Valentine],
We flew to Cape Kennedy before Christmas for three days to watch the launching of the Apollo 8. Very thrilling.
And then took a long slow exhausting milk run of a flight from Orlando, Florida, to Missoula, Montana. I had a martini at Butte (I wished it had been one of Alan’s!) which got me through the last four stops. We landed in snow and it snowed all the time we were there. Despite snow and cold it was a warm happy family visit. Charles, Land, and Richard went out (in 38 degrees below weather) morning and evening to throw out hay for the cattle, Charles looking like Admiral Byrd at the North Pole in his arctic parka and pants. But I stayed inside, washed dishes and read to children—eventually, of course, catching their flu. On to Seattle, I by this time quite hoarse (“Don’t mind me—it’s just my voice,” you say gasping), and eventually back to Darien where I spent a week recovering.
Since then (Charles went right off again to Europe), I have been working very hard trying to put down my mixed emotions about the Apollo 8 launching and flight, working from nine to five with half hours out to run around the house to clear my head before lunch and supper. Probably this will never appear in print but be saved (and read?) by my great-grandchildren, who will think going to the moon very routine. I wonder? The moon, to quote the understatements by the astronauts, “does not seem to be a very inviting place to live or work.” Perhaps, as an engineer at Cape Kennedy voiced his fears to us, the moon may turn out in importance and interest to be rather like the poles. In any case, I wrote steadily for two weeks, and thought and read a great deal in the process. I thought of Henry Adams standing in front of the dynamo in Paris at the turn of the century, and also of Lorenz’s* last chapter in Aggression where he says space exploration does offer, to a superb degree, the moral equivalent for war (or words to that effect), and that must be why it has aroused such excitement in the world. People unconsciously sense this helps to keep us at peace.
I have not thanked you for your delicious scrambled proverbs of Laura Stevens. She was my roommate at Smith for one year so I know what a joy her perception and humor are to live with. Her proverbs reminded me of one of Ansy’s which delights me often, which I pass on to you for the same collection: “I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it”!
Much love to you both—
Anne
Kipahulu
Hana, Maui, Hawaii
February 1st, 1969
D.D.
I have been here since Monday when I arrived late evening by small plane from Honolulu. There was a cable here from CAL telling me he would arrive Saturday from the Philippines—six days after me! Anyway, it takes me about that time to catch up with sleep and the change in climate. I am down in the little guest cottage by myself, next to the beach. It is peaceful and comfortable, and up to yesterday there was no one at the “big” house up the hill but Mrs. Pryor, whom I like very much. Yesterday Sam Pryor and two guests flew in.†
It has, however, rained every day since I arrived—torrents of tropical rain. The sea roars all night and the trade winds shake the house. I go up and down to the big house for lunch and supper in a four-wheel-drive Jeep—in a raincoat, hat and sneakers. But I feel damp all the time. Not cold, though, just damp. It was like this the week we were here last year too, but I thought it was freak weather. Now I’m not so sure. I read an article in the paper about the return to “our usual wet weather winter climate”!! No wonder everything grows like tropical Yucatan!
The sun comes out occasionally, for perhaps an hour a day off and on, and I rush out to sit in it. I have not yet seen our property, waiting for CAL to show it to me. It is very beautiful. Honolulu is just like a suburb of L.A.—skyscrapers on a beach and everyone floating around in muumuus at the airport with “Aloha” chanting from the loudspeakers wherever you go. But Maui—this end of it anyway—is a wild beautiful untouched island. The coasts are rocky and dramatic with waves pounding on the black sands and spray dashing up on the cliffs (not exactly my kind of swimming but just CAL’s cup of tea!). The green mountainous volcanic slopes fall down into the sea abruptly (a little like the Virgins but not such good weather). There are all the beautiful flowering plants and trees one saw in Nassau, Mexico and Africa: poinsettia, bougainvillea, hibiscus—but no hummingbirds.
The nearest shopping area is three quarters of an hour away over a rough stony road with blind curves negotiable by Jeep. There, there is a quite charming hotel, four or five small stores, a post office, and one big general store which sells everything from steaks and papaya to aloha shirts and Japanese sake cups. (I liked this store—lots of fun.)
It has been restful and I begin to sleep better, though sometimes when the rain and winds howl and that surf roars like last night I get scared and wonder if this little house won’t cave in to the sea or get washed out by mud slides. Last night I got up with a flashlight (no electricity except for a generator-run system that keeps breaking down) to look out and see whether the waterfall wasn’t coming in the back door—it sounded like that!
Today I am waiting for word from CAL as to when his plane gets into Honolulu and what plane he can catch from there to Maui so I can go meet him at the little airport at Hana. (The logistics seem to me about as difficult and the weather not as reliable as Treasure Island in Nassau—remember?) What a romantic C. is! Imagine buying a vacation home without even trying out the climate and locale for one season! However, I suppose we can always get rid of this property if it turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth. At the moment, I recommend your coming to visit me in Switzerland. (That can be rainy, too, but I have a fireplace and a furnace and electric light.)
I don’t think we’ll be here long, as the Pryors are leaving in four or five days for a trip to Australia and I can’t see our staying on much after that—though they have kindly offered us this guest cottage for as long as we want. I’m really rather anxious to get back and get to work again—
Love from a rather damp
Lotus Eater
Scott’s Cove
Darien, Conn.
February 23rd, 1969
Dear Mrs. Marcos,*
I apologize for this late reply to your beautiful gift which my husband brought me from the Philippines.† We have both been working on an article for Life magazine on the Apollo 8 launching (which we witnessed) and its setting in Florida, which is in a wildlife refuge. It was, in a way, an article for wildlife conservation, which you know my husband cares deeply about. The magazine had to have the article by Monday of this last week and we spent every moment of every day these last weeks at a desk, rewriting, correcting and checking details, to get it done on time.
I am just now able to get to my desk to write a personal letter. I was most touched by the message on your card, that my book Gift from the Sea had meant so much to you.
This pleased me more than I can say, especially because of all my husband had told me about you and your family after his visit to the Philippines.
The beautiful old Chinese celadon bottle is a precious treasure. I have never seen anything like it except in museums. Its lovely shape, its muted milky-green color, and the many-toned texture of the glaze suggest to me the eternal mystery and beauty of the sea. I have taken it out to the quiet little cabin, away from the house, where I go to think or write when I am home. I have there only the things I really treasure and that bring peace and beauty. Perhaps your bottle is really too rare and precious a piece to be there, but it seemed to me to be the right place for it. I shall always look at it with pleasure and gratitude to you and remember your kind words about my book.
My husband enjoyed so much his time in the Philippines and meeting you and President Marcos. He was happy about his visit and the interest shown there in preserving the beauty of your country. He wants very much to go back again and to bring me, too, sometime. I will look forward to this pleasure and to meeting you and your husband.
In the meantime, my warm thanks for your message and the beautiful gift.
Very sincerely yours,
Anne Lindbergh
Darien
Sunday, November 9th, 1969
Dear Ruth [Oliff],
I have the impression that I said nothing very clearly or to the point last night in our lengthy telephone conversation in the early hours of the morning. In the first place, of course, I was startled out of a sound sleep by the ring of the telephone and reached for the phone in a dazed sense of shock. A call like that, coming in the middle of the night, means sudden death or tragedy. I’ve never had a call like that that wasn’t bringing me news like that, so I steeled myself for word of Charles’s crash, a child’s sudden death, etc. It was hard to talk normally after that preparation.