Gift from the Sea and Letters to a Young Poet

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Ranier Maria Rilke, respectively



I’m about to leave home for nearly a year. It’s frightening and exciting; happy and sad. When I’m in significant turmoil (and by that I mean more turmoil than usual), I retrieve Gift from the Sea and Letters to a Young Poet from the shelves. They are books that calm my soul.

Letters to a Young Poet was recommended reading on the topic of “being an artist” from a professor (interestingly enough, not my flute teacher) during my music school days. So, too , was The Inner Game of Tennis, a book that left my bookshelves years ago; perhaps I should think about replacing it now that I’ve picked up my flute again. For the moment, I’m thinking mostly about the body mechanics (breathing and air flow) of playing. I’ll likely not ever have to deal with the inner game of music performance again, so perhaps this whole digression is moot. But there you have it.

My copy of Letters is in surprisingly good condition for as many times as it’s been thumbed through and annotated. Between page 74 and 75 rests a four-leaf clover taped to a plain white index card; it’s been there for years. Just recently, my first husband mentioned my ability to find tiny things—like four-leaf clovers—as something he remembers about me with great fondness; that thought makes me inexplicably happy.

Here’s an underlined section from the good luck charm-marked page 74 that’s held special relevance for me this summer. I replace Rilke’s “doubt” with “addiction,” now, as I read this passage:

… all emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of you and so distorts you…your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed, perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers—perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.

I hope, indeed, that is true.

As I prepare for this year of living away from home, I have plans to write, to read, to play my flute, to think, to heal ... and to and spend time with my life’s companion who has largely been away from home, himself, the past few months. Our time away will be an interesting paradox: hours of great togetherness and hours of great solitude. Perhaps that paradox is at the heart of my wanting to return to Letters and Gift this summer: really, how does one lead a life that is simultaneously creative, connected, and solitary?

Little wonder I find myself in turmoil, you say! And you might also have chuckled and wanted to draw my attention to the very first words of Gift from the Sea as you were reading the paragraph I just penned above since you know I will be on the beach at Lamu (with my sketch book, colored pencils, yarn, thin, blue Kenyan airmail stationery and several books lumped chaotically together in a carry-all beside me) when you, my friends The Biblioworms, next gather! Lindbergh wrote:

The beach is not a place to work, to read, to write, or think. I should have remembered that from other years. Too warm, too damp, too soft for any real mental discipline or sharp flights of spirit. One never learns. Hopefully, one carries down the faded straw bag, lumpy with books, clean paper, long over-due unanswered letters, freshly sharpened pencils, lists, and good intentions. The books remain unread, the pencils break their points, and the pads rest clean and unblemished as the cloudless sky.

I hadn’t really thought of it before, but there’s a little bit of a parallel, too, with my upcoming travels and something Rilke wrote (it’s scribbled on the back cover of my copy of Letters), in another of his works. I think it was On Love and Other Difficulties:

Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life, if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might be able to write ten lines that were good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (one has those easily enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, must feel how the birds fly and see the gesture by which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen in coming …

So I will hope that my life experiences to this point—the calm and the tumultuous; the wise and the not-so-wise; the caring and the selfish—when added to the ones I will have in the coming months, might lead to one sentence, one musical phrase, one scribbled thought on the margin of a page—one thing—that is truly good. In Letters, Rilke reminds us:

… that something is difficult must be a reason more for us to do it. (I should mention that my copy has an arrow pointing to that line, and, next to the arrow, in handwriting that is undeniably my own, the scribbled word “maybe.”) To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other is but preparation … and so loving, for a long while ahead and far into life, is—solitude intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

So perhaps I should look at the next few months as an amazing amalgam of the underlinings, scribbles, and yearnings that I’ve written in the pages of my favorite books over the years.

Written as a classified ad, all that marginalia might read something like:


Introverted aspiring artist (with lots of good ideas but notoriously lacking in follow-through) seeks the companionship of an adventurous, accomplished (and notoriously shy) distinguished professor-type for solitary time spent (paradoxically) together on safari watching elephants in Samburu; on Lamu, walking quietly along miles of sandy beaches; and, of course, standing on the shores of Lake Turkana, where we will have just been swimming with the crocodiles. Must love listening to repetitive flute practice and playing competitive Scrabble. Must also be a consummate writer and storyteller (in English) with working knowledge of Swahili. In addition, must also be observant enough when listening to a draft of this little essay to wonder: “How can your pencil points be broken if your paper is unblemished?”