A 'HYMN OF PRAISE TO LIFE
Sheridan, Mary
The Progressive's Bookshelf A 'Hymn Of Praise' To Life THE STEEP ASCENT, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Harcourt, Brace. $2. Reviewed by Mary Sheridan THIS war's airmen, Anne Lindbergh writes in the...
...Trying to describe The Steep Ascent to friends, I've found it elusive, like trying to describe a poem...
...Her book, "a fictional account of an actual incident," is a summing up of what years of flying taught her...
...The imminence, the threat of danger heightened one's awareness and appreciation of life...
...It is written for the women "in the back cockpits" of the planes men are fighting and dying in...
...But the "deeper inner core" of life, the life of life—what was it ? Escaping from death, she senses that life, like her child, was a gift...
...Intimate and tender...
...They fly in a single engine, small low wing plane, with no radio, no parachutes...
...They feel the nearness of death before they escape from danger...
...Reviewed by Mary Sheridan THIS war's airmen, Anne Lindbergh writes in the preface to The Steep Ascent, are learning in a short time what she learned in years...
...When they do speak, the aviators of the present war, what they say is usually far clearer than what earth-bound civilians can say...
...Poetic, yes...
...She was able to taste all her life with full appreciation and with full consciousness in that precious instant...
...they ask...
...Married to an aviator or an invalid, Eve reflected, the sense of danger sharpened your sense of life...
...It was not love of danger itself...
...As Exupery wrote in Wind, Sand and Stars, "It is not danger I love...
...her husband is taking her to Egypt's sunny warmth...
...She cherished the sharing, with Gerald, of her joys...
...One could cherish and share its "otherness...
...Imaginative...
...They seem, perhaps because of living more generously and fully in the moment, to have achieved a new sense of time and space, a new vision of the world...
...Anne Lindbergh says yes to life...
...but to hoard or clutch it was to lose it...
...She is with child and has been ill...
...Flying, Eve felt the freedom of "a limitless feeling of space and time...
...Is it mystical...
...Though it is written primarily for the women back home, waiting, certainly its testament to life is for anyone anywhere...
...Earth-bound, there was the grip of time, the urgent pressure of details...
...I know what I love...
...One was dedicated to it but one could not own it...
...It is a woman's lyrical "hymn of praise" to existence, written with distilled selectivity and great beauty...
...As Eve, an American married to an English flier, sits in the back cockpit while Gerald pilots their plane over the Alps toward Italy and Egypt, her mind climbs too, searching for integration of the near and the far...
...They get lost in fog...
...She relished, in memory, the textures she liked—of wool, of crusty French bread, of a runny Italian cheese...
...Her boy, her home, Gerald;—all that she could never synthesize in daily living was somehow synthesized here...
...As her mind traveled, she tasted and drank from the larder of her life...
...But flying, "Time was free, ever-present, eternal, calm...
...It is life...
Vol. 8 • March 1944 • No. 13
