Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote Gift from the Sea in 1955, over seventy years ago. Other than her referring to being swamped by “public print” rather than digital media, it has a timeless relevance as a very meditative barbaric yawp on the ways in which we are flooded by the events in a world that has grown smaller and more interconnected—not in a positive way but in the sense of feeling overwhelmed by all the “vibrations” of disturbance from around the world to which we cannot possibly respond personally. How do we remain open to the shared suffering of the world-wide human community without succumbing to what Robert Jay Lifton described so powerfully in his notions of “psychic numbing” and “malignant normality”? Lindbergh does not provide a simple answer, but over seventy years ago she gave elegant witness from a deeply feminine perspective to the problem of remaining human and decent in a world gone mad.
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 planetary 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, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.
But just how far can we implement this planetary 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 inter-relatedness 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 life-span 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.