Donna Trussell

I just finished “Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh‘s collection of diary entries and letters. Lindbergh was such a graceful writer, and yet today she’s remembered more for her marriage to aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh than for her books. I never hear writers talk about her work, but a more eloquent writer on the subject of grief, I’ve yet to find. (On March 1, 1932, her infant son was kidnapped and murdered.)

Here’s her diary entry for September 13, 1932, a day when she’d flown from Long Island to Maine:

“We are very high. There is Mount Desert, a cone above the mist, and Isle au Haut, and Monhegan behind now. Behind, all the islands running away, pulling in one direction like little boats in a harbor with the tide, all amethyst, running away over the edge of the round world.

“But the hair is whipping in my eyes. I have to turn and face the wind. There are the Camden Hills, those ripples in the earth, and the breakwater like a straight flagpole laid flat on the harbor. And the two islands of North Haven spreading towards me, reaching out points and bays towards me. The long arm of Crabtree Point approaching — now our point.

“It is still there, it is all there — these islands sweeping out to sea, these islands floating on the top of the world, spilling over the edge of the world. They are all here, beautiful and still, spread flat before me, as they were the year before — and many years before — as they would be always. Daddy had died since last year, and the baby (I’m glad he lived in this beauty for a while). But these would be here, always. And I was happy as though I had recovered them for a moment, as though I had recovered everything ever lost, as though I had everything — everything worth having. And I tried to know why, to keep something from this moment of ecstasy, some secret to comfort me when I came down to the human world again.

“What was it, what was the key I had? Was it the divinity of seeing familiar things in a new and clearer light? The island had always been like that, but I had never seen it from that angle. Was it seeing things in their right proportion — or more in their right proportion? Seeing how the island fitted into the bay, how our point into the island, or seeing so much at once that had been separated and confused before, seeing it all as one, Mount Desert, Rockland, North Haven, Monhegan.

“I looked down on the little house and figures — at Mother and Elisabeth, two tiny figures clinging together on the lawn. They looked so frail. I felt a terrible pity for them and for all of us struggling in this great plan we can’t grasp or understand, trying to see when we haven’t the power, or the height. If I could only have this height always — but we were coming down now, the pine trees were near and familiar, everyday and human; I was coming down into the world again — the human world. The wind was cold on my face and I had been crying.”