For Buddhists, this is a tale of effective speech. For me, lateral thinking.
Which flight should I take? The 6:00 a.m. that gets me up too early but assures my being there in time, even though I’ll be exhausted? Or the 8:00 a.m., which is cutting it way too close? How about neither—how about I fly in late the night before, stay with a friend so I can catch up with her over breakfast (nice!), and be assured of arriving at my event well rested and on time?
De Bono believes we aren’t born lateral thinkers; that we can train ourselves to think this way. Among the strategies he proposes, there’s one I find particularly appealing: introducing truly random elements and ideas to force yourself to think differently about a problem you are facing. He calls it “random input.” It can be as simple as opening a dictionary and putting your finger on the first word you find and trying to see if that helps you gain a new perspective. Anything that jolts you from your thinking rut.
And if we are searching for that random input, it can always come in the form of a book. Even one that doesn’t seem the slightest bit relevant to the problem at hand: a novel or biography or book of poetry. The worst that can happen is we are still swapping, still perseverating, and still confused. But at least we’ve just read an interesting book.
Gift from the Sea
Recharging
WHEN I STARTED in book publishing, in 1987, after I returned from my three postcollege years working as a journalist and magazine editor in Hong Kong, I spent long hours at the office. I was never prompt in the morning, but I stayed late just about every night and worked just about every weekend. I didn’t always work very efficiently. But I worked. It was a different time; we still used carbon paper to make copies of the letters we wrote, and only the executive secretaries were lucky enough to have IBM Selectric typewriters, with their magical rolling balls. The rest of us (from assistants like me all the way up to senior editors) made do with balky Smith Coronas, which had cartridges you would snap in and snap out when you needed to make corrections.
I was proud of how hard I worked. I was in my mid-twenties and was confident that no one logged more hours than I did.
One spring day, however, I had a conversation that greatly changed my thoughts on work. It was with a formidable editor, one of the stars of the company. She was then in her fifties and was known for her editorial acumen and occasionally sharp tongue. But she seemed to like me, and we spoke often. In fact, I’d never seen evidence of the sharp tongue. I thought we were just chatting when she asked me how much time I was taking off that summer and if I was going to be able to afford to leave town for my holiday.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to take a holiday this year,” I told her. “I’m way too busy.”
Suddenly, she became very severe. She fixed me with an icy glare and then said, “I thought better of you. But you’re clearly either a megalomaniac or a fool.” She paused. “You’re a megalomaniac if you think we all can’t survive for a few weeks without your contributions. And you’re a fool if you think we can, but still insist on working through your vacation.”
It was several days before she spoke warmly to me again. And when she did, I told her of my plan to visit a friend on the nearby Jersey Shore.
I thought of this conversation when I read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s classic book, Gift from the Sea.
This is one of those books I’d heard about and seen on countless shelves, especially in, predictably enough, beach cottages. The author was the widow of aviator Charles Lindbergh and the mother of the baby who had been so notoriously kidnapped and murdered in 1932.
In an introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s daughter Reeve writes of her mother:
I remember how small and delicate she always seemed. I remember her intelligence and her sensitivity. But when I reread Gift from the Sea, the illusion of fragility falls away, leaving the truth. How could I forget? She was, after all, a woman who raised five children after tragically losing her first son in 1932. She was the first woman in America to earn a first-class glider pilot’s license, in 1930, and the first woman ever to win the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, in 1934, for her aviation and exploration adventures. She also received the National Book Award, in 1938, for Listen! The Wind, her novel based on those adventures, and she remained a best-selling author all her life.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, even with all her published works, remains something of an enigma. This is especially true with regard to her noninterventionist stance in the early years of World War II. Her antiwar writings prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor may have been fueled by naive pacifism and the desire to support her husband. She would later express regret about what she called her ignorance and blindness with regard to Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Twenty-three years after the murder of her son and ten years after the end of World War II, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote Gift from the Sea. It became an immediate sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in its first year and millions since. It has never been out of print.
Gift from the Sea is a quiet book of reflections and meditations written during and after a period of time spent at the Florida seashore. Each chapter takes its inspiration from a different shell the author finds along the beach. The book contains Lindbergh’s thoughts on feminism, the environment, motherhood, marriage, work, love, independence, and, more broadly, how we manage our time and our lives.
Some of Lindbergh’s advice comes across as dated. But most of it doesn’t. Her words are directed toward other women, but most of her advice is for anyone who seeks to find balance in life.
The first gift from the sea is a channeled whelk shell. She is struck by the simplicity, bareness, and beauty of that shell. Her “shell” is not at all like that. She writes of the life in her house in the suburbs:
It involves food and shelter; meals, planning, marketing, bills and making the ends meet in a thousand ways. It involves not only the butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker but countless other experts to keep my modern house with its modern “simplifications” (electricity, plumbing, refrigerator, gas-stove, oil-burner, dish-washer, radios, car and numerous other labor-saving devices) functioning properly. It involves health; doctors, dentists, appointments, medicine, cod-liver oil, vitamins, trips to the drugstore. It involves education, spiritual, intellectual, physical; schools, school conferences, car-pools, extra trips for basket-ball or orchestra practice; tutoring; camps, camp equipment and transportation. It involves clothes, shopping, laundry, cleaning, mending, letting skirts down and sewing buttons on, or finding someone else to do it. It involves friends, my husband’s, my children’s, my own, and endless arrangements to get together; letters, invitations, telephone calls and transportation hither and yon.
My husband and I have no children. We’ve never wanted children of our own, which is good because we can barely keep our one houseplant alive. But our friends who are parents tell me that this description of life fifty years ago almost exactly describes their lives today.
Lindbergh also writes about the challenges of “ever widening circles of contact and communication.” She’s referring to print media and radio—but she could easily be talking about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram as well: “What a circus act we women perform every day.”
The problem as she sees it is “how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life.”
The solution? Neither easy nor complete. She notes that it isn’t possible to renounce life, to become a hermit, a nun. What she can do, she decides, is to establish an alternating rhythm between the clutter of her daily life and the simplicity she experiences at the beach and the beach house. She notes that, “for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.” The gift of the whelk shell is the reminder to choose, whenever possible, simplicity.
The moon shell is another gift from the sea: this shell reminds her of the importance of relearning to be alone and scheduling time alone. “The world today does
not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone.” She writes that if you say you have a business appointment scheduled, no one will try to convince you to break it to schedule something routine. “But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange.” She is particularly adamant that women need solitude—and must find a way to get it, however they can.
Other shells bring her thoughts on love, relationships, and acceptance, silence, selectivity, significance, and beauty. The shell that brings her the gift of beauty is especially important to her.
She writes, “My life in Connecticut, I begin to realize, lacks this quality of significance and therefore of beauty, because there is so little empty space…Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures—an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant.”
An excess of shells is certainly a happy problem. But it is a problem nonetheless.
Her solution is surprising: to choose whenever possible the unknown over the familiar, for “it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.”
As I am writing this, the world (including myself) is caught up in a love affair with a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Japanese home-organization guru Marie Kondo. The book instructs you to go through your home, category by category, not room by room or closet by closet. You lay out all your clothes on the floor; or all your books; or all your knickknacks. And then you hold up each item and ask yourself if it gives you joy. If it doesn’t, out it goes. It’s a technique that works, but works best for those who live alone. Several couples I know have been embroiled in ferocious arguments when one person decided that every single item laid out on the floor still gave joy and the other felt quite the opposite.
I’ve attempted to apply Kondo’s advice. I’ve been very successful with my clothes, which is probably because I don’t care very much about clothes. I’ve not been very successful with ridding myself of books. Most of my books give me joy. Even Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do, the manual for a martial art I will never practice. Even each one of my several coffee table books devoted to portraits of ornamental chickens. (Actually, those give joy to everyone who sees them.) And once a cookbook enters my home, it’s never leaving.
Nor am I parting with Kondo’s book. It gives me joy, too. Reading it allows me a vision of my life where we can set our mugs of tea on a table without having to clear a space for them; where our chest of drawers isn’t crammed full of odds and ends; where we have eight plates that all match and not eleven sole survivors from previous sets and rummage sales.
I enjoy the Kondo fantasy. And it is indeed a pleasure to be able to find things easily in my now-somewhat-cleaner closet. And yet I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be any happier in the completely pristine version of my life than I am in its semi-messy present.
While Kondo gives techniques for ridding ourselves of physical clutter, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book reminds us of all the other kinds of clutter that burden us. It also helps us forgive ourselves when we realize that jettisoning our emotional and spiritual clutter is more difficult than the very difficult task of throwing away all that stuff that no longer gives us joy.
The Taste of Country Cooking
Nourishing
EVERYONE THINKS our friend Marco Pasanella and his wife, Becky, and their son, Luca, are Italian, and everyone is both wrong and right. Marco was born in New York and grew up in New York; but his grandparents were Italian, and he spent a good part of his childhood there, mostly summers, especially after his father moved back to Italy when Marco was in college. So he’s half-Italian, with dual citizenship. Becky is from rural Pennsylvania, but her sense of style and hospitality are pure Italy, a country she first visited and fell in love with as an adult, on trips to see her in-laws. And Luca, age ten, likes nothing more than to eat and hang out with friends. So, as far as I’m concerned, that makes them all Italian.
For years, the Italian government thought Marco was wholly Italian—and tried to conscript him for mandatory military service every time he came to visit. Eventually his age did what his father’s attempts to fix the paperwork could not. When Marco turned forty, the Italian government ceased its efforts to enlist or imprison him, and finally ended all conscription two years later. But these bureaucratic troubles didn’t lessen Marco’s love for Italy, nor his father’s. Marco’s father loved Italy with all his heart: the art; the landscapes, which he painted every day right up to the day he died, age seventy-nine; and the food.
In his eulogy for his father, Marco mentioned that his father’s last supper was a Christmas Day feast with friends in Torre del Lago, a lake town. Marco’s father ate:
Antipasto di pesce
Risotto ai frutti di mare
Branzino al forno
Dolce
Vino bianco
“I know this,” Marco said, “because, for thirty-five years, my father kept a diary that listed everything he ate and drank and with whom. Twenty-five thousand two hundred fifty times, according to my calculations, he listed the dishes and the beverages along with a seating chart. Overlaid onto the meals are a series of color-coded lines and shapes, which I have yet to decipher. Other than the date, the menu, and the dining companions, there are no other words in his diary.”
For Marco’s father, I suspect the food diary did more than simply help him remember what he ate and with whom; I would guess it helped him remember everything else he did that day, his whole life.
A company in Silicon Valley is now manufacturing shakes called Soylent (an odd nod to a film called Soylent Green about—spoiler alert!—cannibalism). The idea is that you don’t ever have to stop working—you can just suck down one of these shakes a few times a day and get all the nutrition you need.
Lin Yutang believed that nothing was more important than having meals with friends. In The Importance of Living, he writes, “It’s a pretty crazy life when one eats in order to work and does not work in order to eat.” Lin Yutang’s wife and daughter believed the same; they devoted years of their lives to creating a book called Chinese Gastronomy, which helped introduce the world to real Chinese food.
I live to eat. I think about food all day long. By the time I finish dinner each evening, I’m already excitedly pondering what I’ll eat the next morning, noon, and night.
Often, a novel I’m reading will make me ravenous. Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Sticks and Scones by Diane Mott Davidson, The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester, and The Book of Salt by Monique Truong—I had to put each of these books down after a few chapters and run to the grocery store or a nearby restaurant. And it’s not only from tales that feature food. Any story set in Japan, for example, will make me desperate for Japanese food. And any book set on the high seas will make me crave seafood, even In the Heart of the Sea, a work of nonfiction by Nathaniel Philbrick about the search for the real Moby-Dick, a book where the main source of sustenance for the sailors is, by necessity, other sailors. It didn’t make me into a cannibal, but it did leave me with a fierce hunger for shrimp scampi.
And anyone who is in a book club, as I am, knows that when it’s your turn to host, you find yourself scouring the pages of whatever you are reading to come up with an appropriate meal to make (or order) and beverage to serve. As far as I’m concerned, any book set anywhere near the Caribbean gives license to eat jerk chicken and drink rum.
Oddly, reading cookbooks often satisfies my hunger. If I look at one great recipe, my mouth starts watering. But by the time I’ve looked at a few dozen dishes, my confused mind is happy to settle for a cup of tea.
Also, like most cookbook fans, I tend to read them in bed after I’ve brushed my teeth and before I sleep. The great baking books inspire sweet dreams; the best
international books transport me around the world; and the books of healthy cooking send me to sleep feeling virtuous just for having read them. But some cookbooks take my dreams much further: they inspire me not just to want to bake, travel, or eat more healthful food—but to live a better life. Some of the cookbooks I own and read are among the wisest books I’ve ever owned or read.
There’s Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, by Laurie Colwin. This is a book from 1988 that people who love food and who love good writing tend to love. Colwin celebrates what she calls home food: meals like “a savory beef stew with olives and buttered noodles, a plain green salad with a wonderful dressing, and some runny cheese and chocolate mousse for dessert. Heaven!”
She writes, “We live in an age of convenience foods and household appliances. We do not have to slaughter pigs, pluck chickens, or make soap and candles. We do not hand-wash clothes. Machines often wash our dishes for us—and still everyone complains that they hardly have any time. The American family, we are told, is falling apart. It does not dine: it grazes from snack to snack.”