Murmuring Shells

GIFT FROM THE SEA (128 pp.)--Anne Morrow Lindbergh--Pantheon ($2.75).

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, author of charming books about flying to far-off places (North to the Orient, Listen! The Wind) now has written a trenchant little book about a fundamental home problem. Sitting by the sea on a fortnight's vacation, Author Lindbergh, 48, contemplates her own round as a housewife (in Darien, Conn.) and mother of five children. "My mind reels . . . What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby carriage, parasol, kitchen chair . . . Steady now!''

For all their emancipation, thinks Anne Lindbergh, modern women have become bonded in a wider enslavement. Women ("the great vacationless class") simply must take time alone if they are to regain this "timeless inner strength" which "we [have] been seduced into abandoning . . . for the temporal outer strength of man. " As she picks up shell after shell during her seaside musings, Author Lindbergh seems to hear in them the murmur of delicate truths--the double-sunrise suggests the early stage of marriage; the oyster, with small shells clinging to its back, symbolizes the middle years of marriage, children, the home; the moon shell reminds her of the importance of solitude. Finally, the paper nautilus recalls the free ebb and flow which she thinks necessary in all good human relationships.

Anne Lindbergh's answers to middle-age perplexities are never preachy, and always beautifully phrased. Her protest against "too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities valuable things, and interesting people," speaks for all sorts of harried women--and men.

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