Madame Lindbergh(PART 2 OF 3)
I see her point.
Do you agree on that?
Yes, I do. Very much so. Kato, do you also think that the kingdom of heaven is within?
Yes, I do---most definitely.
You sound as religious as I do, don't you?
I doubt. Anyway, I looked into the later life of Madame Lindbergh. Diane, you might be interested in the following passage:
Anne's Later Life
Over the course of their 45-year marriage, Charles and Anne lived in New Jersey, New York, England, France, Maine, Michigan, Connecticut, Switzerland, and Hawaii.
Charles died on Maui in 1974. Though he never showed it, Charles was hurt by Anne's three-year affair in the early 1950s with her personal doctor. This may have led to the fact that from 1957 until his death in 1974, Charles had an affair with a Bavarian woman 24 years his junior, whom he supported financially.
The affair was kept secret, and only in 2003, after Anne and the mistress were both dead, did DNA testing prove that Charles had fathered the mistress's three children. One child came to suspect that Lindbergh was their father and made her suspicions public, after finding among her dead mother's effects snapshots of, and letters from, Charles.
Charles is also suspected of having fathered children by a sister of his Bavarian mistress and by his personal secretary.
All this may have contributed to the stoic character of Anne's later life.
After suffering a series of strokes in the early 1990s, which left her confused and disabled, Anne continued to live in her home in Connecticut with the assistance of round-the-clock caregivers.
During a visit to her daughter Reeve's family in 1999, she came down with pneumonia, after which she went to live near Reeve in a small home built on Reeve's Vermont farm, where Anne died in 2001 at the age of 94 from another stroke.
Reeve Lindbergh's book "No More Words" tells the story of her mother's last years.
Reeve Lindbergh Interview
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SOURCE: "Anne Morrow Lindbergh"
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wow!...I did't know that both got involved in love affairs.
Yes, each one of them stepped into an extramarital relation.
Did Madame Lindbergh write about it?
I've got the same question, Diane. So, I looked for any passage regarding her thought about it, and have luckily found it.
For not only do we insist on believing romantically in the "one-and-only"---the one-and-only love, ... the one-and-only security---we wish the "one-and-only" to be permanent, ever-present and continuous. The desire for continuity of being-loved-alone seems to me "the error bred in the bone" of man. For "there is no one-and-only," as a friend of mine once said in a similar discussion, "there are just one-and-only moments."
(omitted)
One comes in the end to realize that there is no permanent pure-relationship and there should not be. It is not even something to be desired. The pure relationship is limited, in space and in time. In its essence it implies exclusion. It excludes the rest of life, other relationships, other sides of personality, other responsibilities, other possibilities in the future. It excludes growth.
(omitted)
One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth. All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms.
SOURCE: pp. 72-75
"Gift from the Sea"
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Published in 1955
Vintage Books, New York
Wow!... What a thought-provoking idea!
Do you really think so?
Yes, I do. It's amazing. The above book was published in 1955, wasn't it?
Yes, it was.
She must have been a futuristic, progressive woman at the time.
I think so, too.
So, Kato, what have you gained from the book?
A good question, Diane...Well, Madame Lindbergh quoted Rilke.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926)
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet.
He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language.
His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose.
Among English-language readers, his best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.
SOURCE: "Rainer Maria Rilke"
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tell me about the quote.
It goes like this:
A complete sharing between two people is an impossibility, and whenever it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a mutual agreement which robs either one member or both of his fullest freedom and development.
But, once the realization is accepted that, even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and againt a wide sky!
Wow!...what a beautiful image! But I wonder who can achieve it in actual life?
You could be the first, Diane... Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ...
(To be continued)