One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky. One double-sunrise is an event; six are a succession, like a week of school days. Gradually one discards and keeps just the perfect specimen; not necessarily a rare shell, but a perfect one of its kind. One sets it apart by itself, ringed around by space—like the island.
For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant—and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.
My life in Connecticut, I begin to realize, lacks this quality of significance and therefore of beauty, because there is so little empty space. The space is scribbled on; the time has been filled. There are so few empty pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. 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.
Here on this island I have had space. Paradoxically, in this limited area, space has been forced upon me. The geographical boundaries, the physical limitations, the restrictions on communication, have enforced a natural selectivity. There are not too many activities or things or people, and each one, I find, is significant, set apart in the frame of sufficient time and space. Here there is time; time to be quiet; time to work without pressure; time to think; time to watch the heron, watching with frozen patience for his prey. Time to look at the stars or to study a shell; time to see friends, to gossip, to laugh, to talk. Time, even, not to talk. At home, when I meet my friends in those cubby-holed hours, time is so precious we feel we must cram every available instant with conversation. We cannot afford the luxury of silence. Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day’s last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star. Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words.
Island living selects for me, but it is a natural, not an artificial selection. It selects numerically but not in kind. There are all kinds of experiences on this island, but not too many. There are all kinds of people, but not too many. The simplicity of life forces me into physical as well as intellectual or social activity. I have no car, so I bicycle for my supplies and my mail. When it is cold, I collect driftwood for my fireplace and chop it up too. I swim instead of taking hot baths. I bury my garbage instead of having it removed by a truck. And when I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased. Most of these physical chores would be burdens at home, where my life is crowded and schedules are tight. There I have a house full of children and I am responsible for many people’s lives. Here, where there is time and space, the physical tasks are a welcome change. They balance my life in a way I find refreshing and in which I seldom feel refreshed at home. Making beds or driving to market is not as refreshing as swimming or bicycling or digging in the earth. I cannot go on burying the garbage when I get home, but I can dig in a garden; I can bicycle to the cabin where I work; and I can remember to bake biscuits on bad days.
My island selects for me socially too. Its small circumference cannot hold too many people. I see people here that I would not see at home, people who are removed from me by age or occupation. In the suburbs of a large city we tend to see people of the same general age and interests. That is why we chose the suburbs, because we have similar needs and pursuits. My island selects for me people who are very different from me—the stranger who turns out to be, in the frame of sufficient time and space, invariably interesting and enriching. I discover here what everyone has experienced on an ocean voyage or a long train ride or a temporary seclusion in a small village. Out of the welter of life, a few people are selected for us by the accident of temporary confinement in the same circle. We never would have chosen these neighbors; life chose them for us. But thrown together on this island of living, we stretch to understand each other and are invigorated by the stretching. The difficulty with big city environment is that if we select—and we must in order to live and breathe and work in such crowded conditions—we tend to select people like ourselves, a very monotonous diet. All hors d’oeuvres and no meat; or all sweets and no vegetables, depending on the kind of people we are. But however much the diet may differ between us, one thing is fairly certain: we usually select the known, seldom the strange. We tend not to choose the unknown which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. And yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.
In so many ways this island selects for me better than I do myself at home. When I go back will I be submerged again, not only by centrifugal activities, but by too many centripetal ones? Not only by distractions but by too many opportunities? Not only by dull people but by too many interesting ones? The multiplicity of the world will crowd in on me again with its false sense of values. Values weighed in quantity, not quality; in speed, not stillness; in noise, not silence; in words, not in thoughts; in acquisitiveness, not beauty. How shall I resist the onslaught? How shall I remain whole against the strains and stresses of “Zerrissenheit”?
For the natural selectivity of the island I will have to substitute a conscious selectivity based on another sense of values—a sense of values I have become more aware of here. Island-precepts, I might call them if I could define them, signposts toward another way of living. Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Balance of physical, intellectual and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells.
Island living has been a lens through which to examine my own life in the North. I must keep my lens when I go back. Little by little one’s holiday vision tends to fade. I must remember to see with island eyes. The shells will remind me; they must be my island eyes.
• 8 •
THE BEACH AT
MY BACK
I pick up my sisal bag. The sand slips softly under my feet. The time for reflection is almost over.
The search for outward simplicity, for inner integrity, for fuller relationship—is this not a limited outlook? Of course it is, in one sense. Today a kind of planetal point of view has burst upon mankind. The world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts and sufferings even in the outermost circle touch us all, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.
But just how far can we implement this planetal awareness? We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather—for I believe the heart is infinite—modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to be stretched; but body, nerve, endurance and lifespan are not as elastic. My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old age. Our
grandmothers, and even—with some scrambling—our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.
Faced with this dilemma what can we do? How can we adjust our planetal awareness to our Puritan conscience? We are forced to make some compromise. Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass. Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves. But can one really feel deeply for an abstraction called the mass? Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present? Can one solve world problems when one is unable to solve one’s own? Where have we arrived in this process? Have we been successful, working at the periphery of the circle and not at the center?
If we stop to think about it, are not the real casualties in modern life just these centers I have been discussing: the here, the now, the individual and his relationships? The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there; and the individual is dwarfed by the enormity of the mass. America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future. Perhaps the historian or the sociologist or the philosopher would say that we are still propelled by our frontier energy, still conditioned by our pioneer pressures or our Puritan anxiety to “do ye next thing.” Europe, on the other hand, which we think of as being enamored of the past, has since the last war, strangely enough, been forced into a new appreciation of the present. The good past is so far away and the near past is so horrible and the future is so perilous, that the present has a chance to expand into a golden eternity of here and now. Europeans today are enjoying the moment even if it means merely a walk in the country on Sunday or sipping a cup of black coffee at a sidewalk café.
Perhaps we never appreciate the here and now until it is challenged, as it is beginning to be today even in America. And have we not also been awakened to a new sense of the dignity of the individual because of the threats and temptations to him, in our time, to surrender his individuality to the mass—whether it be industry or war or standardization of thought and action? We are now ready for a true appreciation of the value of the here and the now and the individual.
The here, the now and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet and—from time immemorial—the woman. In the small circle of the home she has never quite forgotten the particular uniqueness of each member of the family; the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here. This is the basic substance of life. These are the individual elements that form the bigger entities like mass, future, world. We may neglect these elements, but we cannot dispense with them. They are the drops that make up the stream. They are the essence of life itself. It may be our special function to emphasize again these neglected realities, not as a retreat from greater responsibilities but as a first real step toward a deeper understanding and solution of them. When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.
The waves echo behind me. Patience—Faith—Openness, is what the sea has to teach. Simplicity—Solitude—Intermittency … But there are other beaches to explore. There are more shells to find. This is only a beginning.
GIFT FROM THE SEA
RE-OPENED
Looking back at a book published twenty years ago, written in the midst of a busy family life, my chief sensation is astonishment. The original astonishment remains, never quite dimmed over the years, that a book of essays, written to work out my own problems, should have spoken to so many other women. Next comes an embarrassed astonishment at re-reading my naïve assumption in the book that the “victories” (“liberation” is the current word, but I spoke of “victories”) in women’s coming of age had been largely won by the Feminists of my mother’s generation. I realize in hindsight and humility how great and how many were—and are—the victories still to be won. And finally a new development puzzles me: that after so many years, and such great achievement by women, my book should continue to be read.
Why should Gift from the Sea, after all we have undergone in these tumultuous twenty years, have any validity for a new generation of women? To look back on those years is a sobering experience. We have lived through the terms of four presidents and the assassination of one. We have wrestled with the tragedy of a long, divisive and conscience-searing war. We have witnessed shattering advances in science and technology. We have watched a man walk on the moon. We have been rocked by political and economic tremors that are still in force and worldwide. All of us have been swept forward by the ground swells of revolutionary social movements, most of them still in progress and not wholly defined by their popular labels. Among those the most important seem to me to be the Civil Rights movement, the so-called Counterculture, Women’s Liberation and the Environmental Crisis. (It is interesting to note that woman has taken as influential a role in the three movements which do not bear her name as in the movement she calls her own.)
The world has totally changed in twenty years and so, of course, have the lives of every one of us, including my own. When I wrote Gift from the Sea, I was still in the stage of life I called “the oyster bed,” symbol of a spreading family and growing children. The oyster bed, as the tide of life ebbed and the children went away to school, college, marriage or careers, was left high and dry. A most uncomfortable stage followed, not sufficiently anticipated and barely hinted at in my book. In bleak honesty it can only be called “the abandoned shell.” Plenty of solitude, and a sudden panic at how to fill it, characterize this period. With me, it was not a question of simply filling up the space or the time. I had many activities and even a well-established vocation to pursue. But when a mother is left, the lone hub of a wheel, with no other lives revolving about her, she faces a total re-orientation. It takes time to re-find the center of gravity.
All the inner and outer exploration a woman has done earlier in life pays off when she reaches the abandoned shell. One has to come to terms with oneself not only in a new stage of life but in a new role. Life without children, living for oneself—the words at first ring with a hollow sound.
But with effort, patience and a sympathetic and supportive husband, one wins through to the adventure of an “Argonauta.” My husband and I even named our last home, on the island of Maui, “Argonauta.” For me, because of my husband’s death, the Argonauta stage was sadly of very brief duration. I am again faced with woman’s recurring lesson. To quote my own words, “woman must come of age by herself—she must find her true center alone.” The lesson seems to need re-learning about every twenty years in a woman’s life.
What then has a grandmother and a widow to give the new generation of women in the oyster bed? Admiration, first of all. As I look at my daughters, my daughters-in-law, my nieces and my young friends, I am astounded at what they accomplish. They are better mothers than I was and they are the admitted equals of their husbands in intelligence and initiative. They have no domestic “help” in their homes and yet with vigilant planning, some skillful acrobatics and far more help from their husbands than any previous generation, they manage to lead enriching lives, including special interests of their own. They go out to work or they study; they write or they teach; they weave or paint or play in musical groups; they are often involved in civic activities. Sometimes they do several of those things
at once.
Are they happy—or shall I say, happier than my generation? This is a question I cannot answer. In a sense, I think it irrelevant. Without hesitation I can affirm that they are more honest, more courageous in facing themselves and their lives, more confident of what they want to do and more efficient in carrying through their aims. But, above all, they are more aware.
Perhaps the greatest progress, humanly speaking, in these past twenty years, for both women and men, is in the growth of consciousness. In fact, those movements I mentioned under their popular labels could be more truly described as enlargements in consciousness. A new consciousness of the dignity and rights of an individual, regardless of race, creed, class or sex. A new consciousness and questioning of the materialistic values of the Western world. A new consciousness of our place in the universe, and a new awareness of the inter-relatedness of all life on our planet.
For women, much of this new awareness is due to the Women’s Liberation movement. Enlightenment has filtered down to a vast audience through the public media. Talks, programs, courses and articles have been addressed to women and concerned with their lives. New ground has been opened up, revealing the undiscovered depths of woman’s emotional life, through the pioneering literature of brilliant writers such as Florida Scott Maxwell, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing and, in our own country, writers as diverse as Elizabeth Janeway and May Sarton. The best “growing ground” for women, however, may be in the widespread mushrooming of women’s discussion groups of all types and sizes. Women are talking to each other, not simply in private in the kitchen, in the nursery or over the back fence, as they have done through the ages, but in public groups. They are airing their problems, discovering themselves and comparing their experiences. More important, they are beginning to talk to men, openly and honestly, often arguing and challenging, but at last trying to explain what they felt could never be explained. They retreat less often behind that age-old screen of women: “If you don’t understand, I can’t possibly tell you.” (How arrogant to assume your partner cannot understand!) And men, to their great credit, for the most part are listening and, I believe, understanding more than we ever expected.