Kristina and Rebecca are reading your Osprey Island in front of the fire in the living room. I must get to my stint of manuscript pages—
XOXOXOXO
Mother
January 21st, 1973
Dear Kristina,
It was lovely to get your letter to us and to hear so much about your Christmas in Maui. I am sorry about your flu, but perhaps I should be grateful since it gave you time to write us!
I was interested that you said you felt “very whole” during this vacation. I think feeling “whole” is very close to “holiness” and usually, when one feels that way, one is what in religious terms was called “in grace.”
I don’t think you ought to let the Arthurian legends and the “Quest for the Holy Grail” depress you. Let their beauty uplift you but don’t try to copy them. They are evocative myths that need to be interpreted, not imitated. I think your instincts about “earthly things” are very sound. They do “go hand in hand with the spiritual” and one cannot cut them apart (as the Puritans sometimes did).
Your letter sent me back to an old prayer of St. Augustine that I’ve always liked, though it is stated in old-fashioned language, and which I think expresses it very well: “O Lord our God, under the shadow of Thy wings let us hope. Thou wilt support us, both when little, even to gray hairs. When our strength is of Thee, it is strength; but when our own, it is feebleness. We return unto Thee, O Lord, that from their weariness our souls may rise toward Thee, leaning on the things which Thou hast created, and passing on to Thy-self, who hast wonderfully made them, for with Thee is refreshment and true strength.”
Then I have been reading Teilhard de Chardin*—a Jesuit who was considered a rebel and his works were not allowed by the church to be published until after his death, about the time you were born. He felt passionately that matter was spiritual and wrote a great deal on this subject, including a Hymn of the Universe in which I found recently another quotation I liked: “What would become of our souls, Lord, if they lacked the bread of earthly reality to nourish them, the wine of created beauty to intoxicate them, the discipline of human struggle to make them strong? What puny powers and bloodless hearts your creatures would bring to you were they to cut themselves off prematurely from the Providential setting in which you have placed them!”
Both these writers were within the body of the church and spoke in its language but you can also read someone like the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who had a much broader view. He was also a mathematician and a scientist and quite modern in his views—but a very spiritual man. He is quoted as defining God as “the creative force in the universe” and goes on to say: “God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But this creation is a continuing process, and the process is itself the actuality, since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to the estate of an irrelevancy. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur.”
This letter is now so long that you will need another day in bed to read it! Sometime when you have a lot of time I will send you one of Teilhard de Chardin’s books. His letters are wonderful because many of them are written to so-called “non-believers.” He excluded no one, and his language in the letters is very direct and sympathetic. (“The world must have a God, but our concept of God must be extended as the dimensions of our world are extended.”) His beliefs did not separate him from the world or people and he could write.
“May the Lord only preserve in me a passionate taste for the world, and a great gentleness; and may He help me pressure to the end in the fullness of humanity.”
I am sure you will find your own way to journey toward your own “holy grail” and sitting in a tree in the woods is a good way to start. I used to sit on stumps and think things out—and writing it out is very very clarifying. It even helps to write only one’s worries and fears and problems. Brought out to the light of day, the nightmares seem to wither to controllable proportions.
I’m glad you find it not so hard to talk in class. The more you do it, the less frightening it will be, and the clearer your thoughts will get. Although perhaps for you, as for me, thoughts are always clearer when one writes them out.
I hope this term is proving to be more expansive and freer—and more fun. I hope, when we get back from Maui—in April?—you and Rebecca will come for another weekend. We expect to leave here for Seattle and then Maui the end of the first week in February or the beginning of the second week. (Probably it will be the second week.)
Much love to you and my love to Rebecca. Thank her for her Christmas card, and congratulations on being eighteen!!
Granny-mouse
Argonauta
March 5th, 1973
D.D.
I was very glad to get your note on Mary—I was sure the operation would be hard on you as well as on her. I am grateful that there are no complications and some improvement, although “slow and reluctant.” (I have puzzled over that last word—is the patient “reluctant” to get well, or is the hip “reluctant”? It is a good word, though—you always make a good and precise and delicate choice of words.)
You were very good to write me about CAL. I really thought he looked rather badly and had so little energy it was frightening. His friends here and elsewhere were rather shocked to see him so thin. I hope he will see the doctor here—a very nice and, I think, competent man—once a week. C. seemed to think they didn’t have the equipment to take blood tests at this little hospital, but I’m not sure. In any case, he can make a twenty-minute flight to a big hospital at the other end of the island quite easily—go down in the morning and come back in the afternoon. (It is a three-hour drive on a very bumpy and winding tortuous road.)
I have finished a first draft of an introduction to Volume III but I’m not satisfied yet with it, or with the volume. The material is not as good in this volume—not as dramatic but also not as fully written or as universal. So I’m trying to explain more in the introduction, to try to make the experience more universal—otherwise it’s not worth publishing. It was a neurotic period and that’s harder to make universal, though goodness knows there are enough nuts around! (Only they don’t recognize themselves as such.)
I am sitting up in bed writing. The ants are not too bad this year but the cockroaches terrify me—they scuttle so—and are so huge and evil looking. I spray them but they take so long to die it’s awful and I can’t sleep afterwards. Also there are lots of rats. I don’t see them, just hear them at night and find their droppings everywhere: on the counters, under the bed, etc. They seem to eat everything—soap, curtains, plastic covers to the cookie jars, shoes, etc.—everything but poison. At night I am scared and read late and take a pill—but in the daytime I don’t mind.
The weather has been beautiful but I’m not out too much. I work all morning at my table and then do light housekeeping midday or shop for groceries, which is an all-day expedition. But evenings—from four till six—are lovely. The wind, which blows ceaselessly all day, quiets down and I go out and weed our bushes or try to transplant something. The nicest hour is sunset—about 6:15—when I sit in my Sears Roebuck chaise longue on the terrace and have a drink and watch the sea and don’t feel I have to do anything. I wish you were here for that!
Much love and thank you,
A.
Argonauta
March 6th, 1973, evening in bed
Dearest Margot,
It is terrible not to have written and it is ridiculous how little time there is to write—far less than at home. I work all morning on the introduction to Volume III, and the afternoons are taken up in doing the wash or sweeping out the dead ants or shopping in the general st
ore. The maintenance of a house in the tropics with failing generators and intermittent water supply and no cleaning woman available is very time consuming. But still, these are purely physical problems and not like the nervous and emotional ones that attack one at home. The weather has been beautiful and though I am not outside much because of the logistics above, Con and I did swim twice and that was delicious.
It was very harmonious having them here and they were most good-natured and long-suffering guests: no electricity, lights (except kerosene), and two major water failures (no plumbing facilities!). Aubrey ate quantities of papaya and Con was so helpful with the cooking and washing up. We were quite busy, however, and I was grateful that she stayed two extra days after the two men left. We really could relax and pad around the house in our bedroom slippers and wrappers and eat minimal meals and talk a great deal—which was a great joy.
This is a rather odd unreal place, I think, but perhaps not as unreal as most resorts because our life is still so primitive, if sometimes difficult. It is very beautiful and is worth it at the end of the day when one can sit and have a drink and watch the sea, which is—at last in the evening—quiet and not roaring and pounding as it is with the trade winds the rest of the day.
Charles just loves it: loves the waves, the constant wind, the kerosene lamps, the generator that won’t behave, the sudden rain squalls, etc. He likes battling with the elements and feeling he is in the wilderness. He is back in New York now for a meeting. I hope he returns soon, as he planned. He really needs the change and the rest this year, having lost pounds this winter with the equivalent of the Mexican “tourista” and a bad cold and cough on top of it. I think it’s under control now, though it is a shock to everyone to see him so thin suddenly.
I am fine and beginning to settle into this life (after three weeks! It takes almost that long) but I do miss my “community” of sisters—especially you! I have very nice, kind and considerate neighbors, but no one really to talk to. But, of course, one works, and the beauty outside helps, and at night I find the tape recorder a great joy since it runs on batteries and I can have music. More than at home where one is always reading every word of the New York Times or filing mail or something. Here, because there is so little to do (except homework), no telephone and not much mail, one listens to waves, birds, wind—and music, if one wants.
It has been quite moving reading Volume III in the clear copy. There is much about you. I met you that winter and it was such a help. I always left you feeling exhilarated and freer. There were so few people to talk to then, and one had so little insight. It was a great discovery in my life and a great help that hard winter to know you. And when I read the descriptions of our talks I glow and think: Yes—it was like that—and it still is! I feel very lucky to have known you for so much of my life and hope you take care of yourself so we have some years left to go on talking!
Darien, Conn.
May 31st, 1973
Dear Stephen [Mitchell],
I am appalled by the time that has flown by since I received your letter of April. Actually it was also long in reaching me—forwarded to Maui—when I unexpectedly came home briefly to see Reeve, who fell off her horse and was quite seriously hurt (now all right) with a fractured skull, broken collarbone and concussion.
We have had a very odd and interrupted winter and fall. My husband, who has never been ill in his life, has not really been well since November: an obscure virus which, when finally gotten under control, left him very thin and rather down, followed by a prolonged attack of shingles, a real Job-like affliction (not serious but painful and infuriating to an active man). We stayed longer in Maui to help him recuperate, and came back to a spring that has telescoped into pressure-filled weeks (mostly finishing the manuscripts for publication—Volume III—extremely difficult and dull and painstaking work). I hope to finish, almost, this week.
All this explanation is only to tell you that I have been hoping to find a week—or a day—when I would be free to see you.… However, you may now be embarked on other plans, work or trips and the time for conversation may be past.…
In any case, I wanted to let you know that I was very happy to get your note and to hear that your experiment was successful and that you are “full of joy.” Even if this joy at its most intense does not usually go on at that pitch, it is a great vision and liberation to have had it and the truth of it will remain at the core of your life and not be devalued by temporary eclipses.
With my love and thoughts and hopes for another meeting. Reeve and I spoke of you this last weekend when I went up to see her. She is writing again and spoke with gratitude of some of the things you had said to her—
Anne
June 8th, 1973
Dearest Ansy,
Your father came back from Paris very happy and full of enthusiasm for you, Julien, Charles and Constance. He had a wonderful visit and said he stayed on an extra day to help correct your book Osprey Island! I hope it was not too rigorous? I find it a great help and he is very perceptive in cutting out “deadwood” or “fat” as well as picking out the repetitions (the “very”s, “nice”s, “wonderful”s, etc.) in a manuscript. But I also find it exhausting and often discouraging. One loses the wood for the trees. One loses one’s vision of the whole, or interrupts the life-rhythm by concentrating on the details. He is helpful but not always right—and he really does not insist but only suggests—so follow your own instincts once you’ve seen the corrections.
I have just had an intensive week of it. It seems to me I have been doing it all winter and spring. First my own corrections on the typescript, then CAL’s corrections, then going over it together, then with Helen Wolff. Then a copy-editor went over it with a fine-toothed comb. Then I went over his corrections. Then CAL went over those. Then both of us together. Then Helen and I, etc. etc., ad infinitum. I am by now so thoroughly sick of the ego of the adolescent and young married AML I can hardly stand to publish it. It is not a very good book, most of it jotted down in shorthand and full of tumultuous ups and downs. Still, it is done now—except for the galleys, sometime in July. I only hope Helen, who devours work, won’t have the first copy of Volume IV* ready for my perusal just after the galleys are done. I would like to get onto something else.
Your father is a lot better—and even gained weight on his trip abroad—What did you feed him? Love to everyone and two kisses for Constance—
Mother
En route Kennedy → Missoula
June 8th, 1973
Dear Dwight [Morrow],
I was so pleased at your letter and that you liked Iris Origo’s anthology.† It has given me a great deal of pleasure and I find it wonderful to read at night before I go to sleep. One is taken up to another level of eternal verities, and small troubles and distractions and worries are left behind. I have found the same pleasure and nourishment from an anthology you gave me (Elizabeth Goudge’s Book of Comfort) which is usually in the bookcase next to my bed.
You need not have written me but it was good to get your letter and I was delighted that we both liked the same book—as well as having the same traditions.
Speaking of traditions, I heard—partly humorous in a letter from Nancy, and something from Margot—that you were somewhat interested in trying meditation for your health. As a non-Zen meditator—at times—I thought I would tell of my experience with it. I have not gone to any of the meditation groups, partly because I have no time but more because I feel their approach (the young leaders), as I have heard about it, seems somewhat superficial. I’m afraid that the bringing of a sum of money, a flower, and a fruit, and being given “a mantra” to say while meditating is too foreign to me; I could not do it naturally. I have met and talked to various proponents of meditations—Zen, Buddhist, Indian, etc.—and even been given instruction and read some books on it. And I do find that setting aside two periods in the day for sitting quietly and concentrating on my breathing does center me down and relieves the pressure. I think of it not as “
transcending” or becoming a Buddhist, but more as a quieting down routine that prepares me for prayer or work. In other words, it gets rid of the tensions and frees me—also rests me—to do more.
The first person who taught me was an old Buddhist scholar (a woman) who told me to breathe quietly and count my breaths in order to still the mind. She also suggested that I say silently with the incoming breath “coming to be” and with the outgoing breath “ceasing to be,” which is a good quiet rhythm and does still one’s thoughts. Another Zen follower told me that the rhythm of breathing should be: (incoming) one, two, three; (outgoing) one, two, three, four, five, six. (I find it hard to get to six!)
But rather than count breaths, which is meaningless and monotonous, or say a mantra which is foreign to me, I have found if I say inwardly something from my own Christian tradition, it is more natural and more helpful. So I hit on “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” which happens to have the three-six rhythm: incoming breath, “Gloria”; outgoing breath, “in Excelsis Deo.”
I hope this doesn’t all sound too ridiculous to you. I certainly find that the routine of “meditation” (if this is what I’m doing) does quiet me down when I’m agitated and the Transcendental Meditation organization has a good deal of well-authenticated scientific evidence that it brings down blood pressure, etc. Of course, it should not be effortful. You must find your own natural rhythm and try to just let it come easily, keeping your attention on it without trying too hard. (We Morrows were all taught to try hard—fine in certain stages and realms of life but not good when one reaches the sixties, or needs to let down and relax.) So one shouldn’t strain to take deep breaths or meet someone else’s rhythm of breathing. Just watch one’s own gentle rhythm of breathing and sink into it. I also like to sit outside where the beauty of trees, seagulls, and the sounds of the birds all seem to flow through me and the “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” seems a part of the praise going up all around me.
Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986 Page 34