PENGUIN BOOKS
THE CONTINUUM CONCEPT
Jean Liedloff was born and brought up in New York. She graduated from Drew Seminary for young women and went on to Cornell University, but began her travels without taking a degree. Attracted to Europe, then to the South American jungle, she made four expeditions among the Stone Age Indians of Venezuela before becoming convinced that ‘we in Western civilization have tragically misunderstood our own nature.’ After a fifth expedition that confirmed her retrospective observations, she wrote The Continuum Concept.
Jean Liedloff has written for the Sunday Times and was a founding member of the Ecologist magazine. She now lectures and broadcasts around the world to students, doctors, parents, psychotherapists and a general public looking for explanations and remedies for personal alienation and social ills. Jean Liedloff lives in London where she practices and teaches psychotherapy based on the principles of The Continuum Concept. She is planning books on this work and on the rearing of children without conflict. The Continuum Concept has received great critical acclaim and has earned a substantial following in many countries.
The Sunday Telegraph said, ‘It is really a thesis about achieving fulfilment. It is time we reappraised ourselves and discovered what sort of animal we are. We have a standard of living while the Yequana have a quality of life.’
Dr Francis Ilg, author of Infant and Child and eminent pediatrician at the Gesell Institute in New Haven, Connecticut, said, ‘It is a most remarkable book… We have especially met resistance from parents. Something tells me they will listen to this.’
Frankfurter Allgemaine called it ‘inspiring and informative’.
Psychologie Heute said it is ‘The rare case of an optimistic radical book. It shakes the foundations of our conceptions without razing them to the ground, rather a catalyst than dynamite, with a lasting effect on everyday life,’ and selected it as one on The Year’s Best Books.
The Sunday Telegraph Magazine wrote, ‘Miss Liedloff writes beautifully, never stooping to jargon, and her own personal involvement gives her story an immediacy that is most moving.’
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Duckworth 1975
Published in paperback by Futura 1976
Revised edition published in Penguin Books 1986
Published by Arkana 1989
Reissued in Penguin 2004
20
Copyright © Jean Liedloff 1975.1986
All
rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196247-4
For Adam Yarmolinsky, Jonathan Miller, John Horder, Jonas Salk, Tarzie Vittachi and David Hearn who, when they understood the concept, took responsibility upon themselves for its furtherance, just as I had. And for Mouse and Janet with love.
Some Reports and Thoughts for the Second Edition
1 : How My Ideas Were so Radically Changed
Seeing first, understanding later, then going to confirm my observations / Arriving at the Continuum Concept
2 : The Continuum Concept
What a human being is evolved to expect from life / His inherent tendencies / How the continuum works, in the individual and in the culture
3 : The Beginning of Life
Natural birth and traumatic birth / The expectations and tendencies of the infant / The in-arms phase and its consequences in the rest of one’s life / The experience of infants and babies within the continuum and without
4 : Growing Up
What it means to be a social animal / The innate talent for self-preservation, the growth of self-reliance and the importance of respecting the child’s responsibility for himself / The assumption of innate sociality and its implications / How a child educates himself / The kind of assistance required of his elders
5 : Deprivation of Essential Experiences
The blind search for the missed experiences in every corner of life / The hard-drug addict’s secret / Myths of the fall of man / The two steps away from the state of grace: man’s evolved ability to make an intellectual choice and civilized man’s derailment from the continuum / Relief from thinking, meditation, ritual and other thought-erasers
6 : Society
Cultures that suit and cultures that conflict with the continuum / Conformity, reliability, the right not to be bored / Whatever became of joy?
7 : Putting Continuum Principles Back to Work
Sex and ‘affection’: distinguishing between the two needs for physical contact / As need continues, so does the possibility of fulfilment / Understanding and defining our needs from the continuum standpoint / Obstacles in our present way of life / The rights of babies / Approaches to reinstating the continuum in ways open to us / Applications of these principles to research
Index
Three months before this book was first published in 1975, a friend asked me to lend my proof copy to a couple who were expecting their first baby. I met Millicent, the wife, later when she came to lunch with Seth, who was by then three months old. She told me that she and her doctor husband, Mark, were convinced that my ideas made sense because they corresponded to their own feelings. She was very keen that other parents read the book but was worried that some might be discouraged by the idea that they had to carry the baby about constantly for months.
‘I could see the point,’ she said, ‘but I was sure I was not going to lug the equivalent of a ten- or fifteen-pound sack of potatoes around all day and night. I’m afraid you might put people off altogether. Why don’t you just stick to’ “Put the shopping in the pram and carry the baby”, as I heard you say on the radio? Most of them will probably be willing to do that, and when they get home they’ll want to go on carrying it. I never did put Seth down because I didn’t feel like it.’
‘That was the idea,’ I said. ‘It’s only when the baby is there and your feelings for it are not negated that it works, not because someone said you should. Nor would you be likely to want to be stuck in the service of just “a baby” to that extent before you had met and fallen in love with it.’
‘I solved the problem of my bath by taking Seth in with me and bathing him at the same time,’ she went on. ‘If Mark gets home in time, he can’t resist jumping in too. He loves sleeping with Seth as much as I do.
‘I’ve found ways to do all my housework and gardening without putting Seth down. I put him down only when I’m making a bed and bounce him around among the sheets and blankets, and he loves that. And I do wait until Mark can help me bring the coal up from the basement. The only time Seth and I are separated is when I’m riding my horse. A friend holds him then. But I’m always eager to take him back at the end of the ride. It feels right to have him with me. Luckily, I have a printing business with a friend, so I didn’t have to give up my job. I work standing up, and by now I’m used to having him in a sling on my back or hip. I can swing him around to the front if he wants to feed. He doesn’t have to cry; he just grunts and reaches. At night too he only has to nuzzle about and I know he’s hungry. I just plug in a bosom and don’t even really have to wake up.’
Seth was relaxed and quiet through lunch and, like a Yequana baby, no trouble to hold.
It is understandable that Western babies are not welcome in offices, shops, workrooms or even at dinner parties. They usually shriek and kick, wave their arms and stiffen their bodies, so that one needs two hands, and a lot of attention, to keep them under control. It seems that they are keyed up with undischarged energy as a result of spending so much time out of contact with an active person’s naturally discharging energy field that, when they are picked up, they are still rigid with tension and try to rid themselves of the discomfort by flexing their limbs or signalling the person holding them to bounce them on a knee or throw them up in the air and catch them. Millicent was surprised at the difference between Seth’s soft body tone and that of other babies. She said they all felt like pokers.
As soon as it is recognized that treating babies as we did for hundreds of thousands of years assures us of calm, soft, undemanding little creatures, they need no longer cause conflict in working mothers who are unwilling to be bored and isolated all day with no adult companionship. The babies would be where they need to be, with their mothers at work; and the mothers would be where they need to be, with their peers, doing not baby care but something worthy of an intelligent adult. But employers are not likely to be receptive until the reputation of babies has improved. Ms magazine made a heroic effort to bring babies into their office, but it need not have been so heroic if the babies had not been isolated in carriers on nearby desks but had been in physical contact with someone instead.
Not everyone puts continuum principles into practice as early and as happily as Millicent and Mark, who now have more children brought up like Seth. One mother, Anthea, wrote to me that as soon as she read the book she realized she should have listened to her instincts instead of the babycare ‘experts’, but now she had a four-year-old, Trevor, to whom she had done ‘all the wrong things’. Another baby was on its way and would be a ‘continuum baby’ from the start, but what to do about Trevor?
Not only is it difficult to carry a four-year-old about to make up his lost in-arms stage, but it is also important for him to play and explore and learn as befits his chronological age. I suggested that Anthea and Brian take Trevor to sleep with them at night and leave things pretty much as they were in the daytime, except for welcoming the boy on their laps and being physically available to him whenever possible. I also asked them to keep a daily record of what happened, as it was soon after the book had come out and I thought their experience might be useful to others.
Anthea kept the record faithfully. For the first few nights none of them had much sleep. Trevor would wriggle and whine. There were toes up noses, elbows in ears. Glasses of water were called for at ungodly hours. Once Trevor jockeyed himself into a position perpendicular, instead of parallel, to his parents, resulting in their clinging to the edges of the mattress on either side. More than once Brian stomped off to his office in the morning red-eyed and irritable. But they persevered, unlike others who would say to me, after three or four trial nights, ‘It doesn’t work; we couldn’t sleep,’ and give up.
After three months, Anthea reported, there were no more disturbances; all three slept blissfully through the nights. And not only did the relationships of Anthea with Trevor and Brian with Trevor improve markedly, but so did Anthea’s and Brian’s. ‘And,’ she said at the end of her report, mentioning the topic for the first time, ‘Trevor stopped being aggressive at school!’
Trevor moved back to his own bed some months later of his own accord, having had his fill of what would have been infant sleeping experience. His new sister was, of course, in their parents’ bed too, and even after he had moved on Trevor knew he was welcome there whenever he felt the need.
It was reassuring to know that, after four years, one could accomplish so much repair work in only three months. I was most heartened and able to tell Trevor’s story to lecture audiences and people who wrote to me with like questions thenceforward.
Another lady, Rachel, whose family of four was half-grown, wrote, ‘I think your book was one of the cruellest things I’ve ever read. I am not suggesting that you should not have written it. I am not even saying that I wish I had not read it. It’s simply that it impressed me profoundly, hurt me deeply, intrigued me greatly. I do not want to face the possible truth of your theory and am trying my best to avoid facing it… (God forgive you for that sequence about what babies go through, by the way, because, in the deathless words of Noel Coward, I never shall!)… It’s a wonder to me, as a matter of fact, that you were not tarred and feathered at some stage … Every mother who reads it must, do everything she can to avoid its implications … Do you know, I honestly believe that it was only while I thought that all the aggravation we go through was normal and unavoidable – “natural!” to use a word one often hears by way of comfort from other mothers, child psychologists and books – that it was endurable at all. Now that you have intruded into my mind the idea that it could be otherwise, well, I don’t mind telling you that for twenty-four hours after reading your book, not to mention during, I was so depressed I felt like shooting myself.’
Happily, she did not, and we have since become close friends, she a great advocate of the continuum concept and I a great admirer of her honesty and her way with words. But the sentiments she expressed, the depression, the guilt, the regret, have occurred all too often among readers with grown children.
Yes, of course, it is dreadful to think what we have done, with the best of intentions, to the people we most love. Let us think too of what our loving parents have equally ignorantly/innocently done to us and what was undoubtedly done to them. Most of the literate world joins us in the victimization of each new, trusting babe. It has become our custom (for reasons I shall not speculate on here). Does any one of us, therefore, have the right to take the guilt, or even the awful sense of having been cheated, upon herself or himself, as though one alone could have known better?
On the other hand, if, fearing that unreasonable sense of personal guilt, we refuse to acknowledge what is being done to all of us by all of us, then how can we hope to change any part of it? The part nearest us, for example? Nancy, a beautiful, white-haired lady at a lecture of mine in London, said that since she and her thirty-five-year-old daughter had both read my book, their understanding of their relationship had brought them closer together than they had ever been before. Another mother, Rosalind, told me how she had sunk into a weeping depression for several days after reading the book. Her husband was understanding and patiently took care of their two little girls while Rosalind languished, unable to continue her life in the new light. ‘At a certain point,’ she told me, ‘I realized that my only way ahead was to read the book again… this time for strength.’
An acquaintance telephoned me one day in a state of great excitement because he had been seated in a bus behind a West Indian lady with a small child who were enjoying an easy, respectful relationship of a sort seldom seen in British society. ‘It was beautiful,’ he said. ‘I had just finished reading your book and there they were, living illustrations. I’ve been among lots of people like them before without ever seeing what now seems so obvious. I certainly never appreciated the lesson they could be to us if we could understand how they got that way … and why we never do.’
So blind are we that there is actually an organization in Britain called the National Association for Parents of Sleepless Children. Apparently it functions on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous, fortifying the victims of screaming babies with sympathy from fellow sufferers and consolations like, ‘They do outgrow it eventually’, ‘Take turns with your spouse so that each of you can sleep sometimes while the other gets up’, ‘It won’t hurt a baby to be left to cry if you know there is nothing wrong with it.’ The best they have to say is, ‘If everything else fails, it won’t really do the baby any harm to let it sleep in your bed.’
There is never a suggestion that they might call off the war and believe the babies, who unanimously, and perfectly clearly, let everyone know where a baby’s place is.
A parent whose day is centred on childcare is not only likely to be bored, and boring to others, but is also likely to be giving an unwholesome kind of care. A baby’s need is to be in the midst of an active person’s life, in constant physical contact and stimulated by a great deal of the kind of experience in which he or she will take part later in life. The role of a baby while in arms is passive, with all his senses observant. He enjoys occasional direct attention, kisses, tickles, being thrown in the air, etc. But his main business is to witness the actions, interactions and surroundings of his caretaker adults or children. This information prepares babies to take their place among their people by having understood what they do. To thwart this powerful urge by looking inquiringly, so to speak, at a baby who is looking inquiringly at you, creates profound frustration; it manacles his mind. The baby’s expectation of a strong, busy, central figure, to whom he can be peripheral, is undermined by an emotionally needy, servile person who is seeking his acceptance or approval. The baby will increasingly signal, but it will not be for more attention; it will actually be a demand for inclusion in adultcentred experience. Much of the frustration shown by such a baby is caused by his inability to make his signals that something is wrong bring about anything that is right.
Later on, some of the most exasperated and ‘contrary’ children are those whose antisocial behaviour is a plea to be shown how to behave cooperatively. Permissiveness constantly deprives children of the examples of adultcentred life where they can find the place they seek in a natural hierarchy of greater and lesser experience, and where their desirable actions are accepted and their undesirable actions rejected, while they themselves are always accepted. Children need to see that they are assumed to be well intentioned, naturally social people who are trying to do the right thing and want a reliable reaction from their elders to guide them. A child seeks information about what is done and not done, so if he breaks a plate he needs to see some anger or sadness at its destruction but not a withdrawal of esteem for him – as though he were not also angry or sad at having let it slip and resolving on his own initiative to be more careful.
If parents do not distinguish between desirable and undesirable acts, the child often behaves more interruptively and disruptively in order to force them to play their correct part. Then, when they cannot bear any more imposition upon their ‘patience’, the parents may vent all their pent-up anger on the child himself, perhaps saying they have had ‘enough’ of him, and send him out of sight. The implication is that all the previous behaviour they were tolerating was, in fact, bad but that they were misrepresenting their true feelings at the time and that the irremediable badness of the child finally brought their pretence of acceptance of him to an end. The game is defined this way to the children of many a household, who come to see that they are expected to try to ‘get away with’ as much undesirable behaviour as possible before the axe falls, when they are revealed in their true colours as unacceptable.
In extreme cases, when parents, often having had their first child late in life, dote so disastrously upon their little darlings that they never show any sign of distinguishing between what is to be done and what not done, the children are nearly mad with frustration. They rebel at every new ‘Would you like to have this?’, ‘Would you like to do that?’, ‘What would you like to eat… to do … to wear?’, ‘What do you want Mummy to do?’, etc.
I knew a most beautiful two-and-a-half-year-old girl who was treated like that. Already she never smiled. Her parents’ every fawning suggestion of something that might please her was greeted with scowls of discontentment and obstinate repetitions of ‘No!’ Her rejection made them even more abject, and the desperate game went on, with the little girl never able to get her parents to set an example from which she could learn, as they were always looking to her for guidance. They would have given her anything she wanted but could not understand her real need to be with them as they lived their own lives as adults.
Children expend an enormous amount of energy in trying to get attention not because they need attention itself. They are signalling that their experience is unacceptable and are trying to get a caretaker’s attention only in order to correct that experience. A lifelong impulse to seek attention is simply a continuation of the frustrated child’s failure to get it in the first place, until the search for the initial notice becomes a goal in itself, a sort of compulsive contest of wills. So a form of parental attention that prompts more urgent signals from the child is bound to be an inappropriate one. Natural logic forbids belief in the evolution of a species with the characteristic of driving its parents to distraction by the millions. A look at the other millions in such places as Third World countries who have not had the ‘privilege’ of being taught to stop understanding and trusting their children reveals families living in peace and with an eager and useful addition to the family labour force in every child over the age of about four.
My approach to healing the effects of the deprivations of childhood has evolved from an attempt to reproduce the missed experiences themselves to an attempt to convert the messages, conscious and unconscious, left in the psyche as a result of them. I have found, in my own practice as a psychotherapist, that one can successfully commute low or negative expectations of oneself and the world by thoroughly understanding what those expectations are, how they got there and why they are false. The most ingrained feeling of inadequacy, at its very origin, was a knowledge of one’s true worthiness. This knowledge is betrayed and eroded by experiences that impose erroneous beliefs, beliefs that in infancy and childhood one is unable to question. Fears, nameless, shapeless threats of consequences too dire to contemplate, cut off any freedom of action or even thought that lies in their direction. These fears are sometimes so restricting that one is at liberty only to live one’s life in the self-imposed equivalent of a prison yard.
Tracking down one of these terrors to its beginning reveals it to be an experience that, when finally envisaged by the adult, is recognized as frightening only to a child. The ceaseless, draining effort to keep oneself from coming face-to-face with that dread is automatically abandoned, and the part, large or small, of one’s life that was held in thrall by it comes, at last, into its own. One can then allow oneself to do or be whatever it forbade – to be successful or to fail, to be a ‘nice guy’ or stop being such a nice guy, to love or to accept being loved, take risks or stop taking risks – without an inappropriate compulsion preventing the best use of one’s judgement, instinctive and intellectual.
In the late 1970s, during the last of his thirty years of pioneering research in abreaction therapy, I was able to join Dr Frank Lake in some of the work at his centre in Nottingham. He had read this book and was keen to show me that the offences to people’s sensibilities about which I am so concerned begin not at birth but during the equally formative time in utero. The dramatic reliving of these experiences by his many subjects, and subsequently some of mine, convinced me that he was right, especially since he produced the abreactions in me before I had seen anyone else curled up in foetal helplessness, moving limbs in that special way and making sounds and expressing emotions that I came to recognize as being of that time.
I still make use of this technique when a client arrives at a point where he needs to know about his birth or his early infant or intra-uterine experience, but, dramatic though it is, it has been my impression that abreacting is not often therapeutic in itself. The value of the experience lies in its contribution to the subject’s information, which is then integrated into his new understanding of how things really are in his life (as opposed to how he has always believed them to be). Occasionally, an abreaction may turn up the last piece of a puzzle, making possible the leap from understanding to realization, when one’s spontaneous behaviour finally comes to reflect the discovered truth. But it is the truth itself that brings about the transformation… and only the truth, it appears, no matter how it is acquired: by determined detective work employing induction and sometimes deduction, by re-evaluating beliefs unexamined since they were formed in childhood (usually concerned with ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’) as well as through abreaction or data gleaned from others who had no investment in forgetting some event that, in its time, seemed cataclysmic to the subject. The liberating results of this process usually begin to appear quite quickly, and major transformations take months rather than years.
In the light of the continuum concept, a troubled person is an inherently ‘right’ creature whose species-specific needs have not been met and whose precisely evolved expectations have been greeted and treated with self-righteous denial or condemnation by those whose role should have been to respect and fulfil them. Unresponsive parents have the unfortunate effect of making a child feel that he has not been lovable, or deserving, or somehow ‘good’ enough. He cannot, by his nature, conceive them to be wrong: it must be he himself who is at fault. So when he can thoroughly realize that his crying, sulking, self-doubt, apathy or rebellion were correct human responses to his incorrect treatment, his whole feeling about himself as in the wrong changes appropriately. A review of a person’s history in that light, I believe, has in itself a salutary effect and creates a healing atmosphere for someone accustomed to being made to feel unworthy, unwelcome or guilty. I have been glad to hear that many other psychotherapists have found the continuum concept useful too, for themselves, their students and the people they are treating.
Indeed, in the decade since this book first appeared a far more hospitable climate for its ideas has developed in many quarters, such as obstetrics, child care, social institutions and psychology, and in a widening search for trustworthy principles by which to live. I was particularly encouraged to see the description of a film character in a recent Time magazine review, which read: ‘Her sense of social responsibility is informed by unimpeachable instinct, not by suspect ideology.’ I hope this new edition, as well as those in other languages, will be instrumental in allowing unimpeachable instinct increasingly to inform our very suspect ideology.
London, 1985
This book is meant to propound an idea, not tell a story, but I think there is a purpose to be served in telling a little of my history, something of the preparation of the ground in which the concept took root. It may help explain how my views departed so far from those of the twentieth-century Americans among whom I grew up.
I went to the South American jungles with no theory to prove, no more than normal curiosity about the Indians and only a vague sense that I might learn something of significance. In Florence, on my first trip to Europe, I was invited to join two Italian explorers on a diamond-hunting expedition in the region of Venezuela’s Caroni River, a tributary of the Orinoco. It was a last-minute invitation, and I had twenty minutes to decide, race to my hotel, pack, dash to the station and jump on the train as it was pulling away from the platform.
It was very dramatic but rather frightening when the action suddenly subsided and I saw our dimly lit compartment piled with suitcases, reflected in the dusty window, and realized I was on my way to a genuine jungle.
There had not been time to take account of my reasons for wanting to go, but my response had been instant and sure. It was not the idea of the diamonds that I found irresistible, though digging one’s fortune out of tropical riverbeds sounded far more attractive than any other work I could think of. It was the word jungle that held all the magic, perhaps because of something that happened when I was a child.
It was when I was eight and it seemed to have great importance. I still think of it as an experience of value, but like most such moments of enlightenment, it gave a glimpse of the existence of an order without revealing its construction or how one could sustain a view of it in the muddle of day-to-day living. Most disappointing of all, the conviction that I had seen the elusive truth at last did little or nothing towards guiding my footsteps through the muddle. The brief vision was too fragile to survive the trip back to applicability. Although it had to contend with all my mundane motivations and, most disastrously, with the power of habit, perhaps it is worth mentioning, for it was a hint of that sense of Tightness (for want of a less clumsy phrase) the search for which this book is about.
The incident happened during a nature walk in the Maine woods where I was at summer camp. I was last in the queue; I had fallen back a bit and was hurrying to catch up when, through the trees, I saw a glade. It had a lush fir tree at the far side and a knoll in the centre covered in bright, almost luminous, green moss. The rays of the afternoon sun slanted against the blue-black green of the pine forest. The little roof of visible sky was perfectly blue. The whole picture had a completeness, an all-there quality, of such dense power that it stopped me in my tracks. I went to the edge and then, softly, as though into a magical or holy place, to the centre, where I sat, then lay down with my cheek against the freshness of the moss. It is here, I thought, and I felt the anxiety that coloured my life fall away. This, at last, was where things were as they ought to be. Everything was in its place – the tree, the earth underneath, the rock, the moss. In autumn it would be right; in winter, under the snow, it would be perfect in its wintriness. Spring would come again and miracle within miracle would unfold, each at its special pace, some things having died off, some sprouting in their first spring, but all of equal and utter lightness.
I felt I had discovered the missing centre of things, the key to Tightness itself, and must hold on to this knowledge that was so clear in that place. I was tempted for a moment to take a scrap of moss away with me, to keep as a reminder; but a rather grown-up thought prevented me. I suddenly feared that in treasuring an amulet of moss, I might lose the real prize: the insight I had had – that I might think my vision safe as long as I kept the moss, only to find one day that I had nothing but a pinch of dead vegetation.
So I took nothing but promised myself I would remember The Glade every night before going to sleep and in that way never be far from its stabilizing power. I knew, even at eight, that the confusion of values thrust upon me by parents, teachers, other children, nannies, camp counsellors and others would only worsen as I grew up. The years would add complications and steer me into more and more impenetrable tangles of rights and wrongs, desirables and undesirables. I had already seen enough to know that. But if I could keep The Glade with me, I thought, I would never be lost.
That night in my camp bed I brought The Glade to mind, was filled with gratitude and renewed my vow to preserve my vision. And for years its quality was undiminished as I saw the knoll, the fir, the light, the wholeness in my mind every night.
But as more years went by, I often found that I had forgotten The Glade for days, or weeks, at a time. I tried to recapture the sense of salvation that had formerly infused it. But my world widened. The simpler sort of good-girl-bad-girl values of the nursery had gradually been overrun by the often conflicting values of my sector of the culture and of my family, a mixture of Victorian virtues and graces with a strong bent towards individualism, liberal views and artistic talents and, above all, high regard for a brilliant and original intellect like my mother’s.
By the time I was about fifteen, I realized with a hollow sadness (since I could not remember what I was mourning) that I had lost the meaning of The Glade. I recalled perfectly the woodland scene, but, as I had feared when I abstained from taking the souvenir bit of moss, its significance had escaped. Instead, my mental picture of The Glade had become the empty amulet.
I lived with my grandmother, and when she died I decided to go to Europe, though I had not finished university. My thoughts were not very clear during my grief, but because turning to my mother always ended in my being hurt, I felt I had to make a giant effort to get on my own feet. Nothing I was expected to want seemed worth having – jobs writing for fashion magazines, a career as a model or further education.
In my cabin on the ship bound for France, I wept for fear I had gambled away everything familiar to me for a hope of something nameless. But I did not want to turn back.
I wandered about Paris sketching and writing poetry. I was offered a job as a model at Dior but did not take it. I had connections on French Vogue but did not use them except for occasional modelling jobs that entailed no commitment. But I felt more at home in that foreign country than I ever had in my native New York. I felt that I was on the right track, but I still could not have said what I was looking for. In the summer I went to Italy, first to Venice and then, after a visit to a villa in the Lombard countryside, to Florence. There I met the two young Italians who invited me to Venezuela to hunt for diamonds. Again, as on my departure from America, I was frightened by the boldness of the step I was taking but never for an instant considered retreat.
When at last the expedition began, after many preparations and delays, we travelled up the Carcupi River, a small unexplored tributary of the Caroni. In a month we made considerable headway upriver in spite of the obstacles, mainly trees fallen across the water, through which we had to cut a passage for the canoe with axes and machetes, or waterfalls or rapids over which we portaged about a ton of matériel with the help of two Indians. The little river had halved in volume by the time we made a base camp to explore some tributary streamlets.
It was our first day of rest since we had entered the Carcupi. After breakfast the Italian leader and both Indians went off to look at the geological situation, while the second Italian lolled gratefully in his hammock.