A View of the Ocean

The internationally best-selling novelist, playwright Jan de Hartog, author of The Captain and The Peaceable Kingdom, moves and inspires us with this simple, elegant story of his mother and himself. She was a quiet, unassuming woman married to a giant of a man, a famous Protestant theologian and pastor, simple, bighearted and big-muscled, who moved through life with gusto and the commotion of a wagon train and who, but for God, might have become a pirate or a general. He adored his wife and didn't like anyone else around to claim her attention. Their sons saw him as a monster of egocentricity, a tyrant, a blustering bully; to her he was a sensitive, shy, helpless man with a mission. She believed in him from the moment they met, and under the wings of her faith in him as a philosopher, he became one. During their thirty years of marriage this woman's only concern was to enable her husband to hearken to 'the voice of God.' After his death she discovered somewhere deep inside a core of drop-forged steel. She rose to the challenge of widowhood and, continuing his work, took his place in the world. The full splendor of this tiny, frail woman's character, intelligence, and courage became evident during her World War II internment in a Japanese camp in the Dutch East Indies, when she managed to arrange a cease-fire between the Dutch Army and Indonesian guerillas. After her release from prison camp, she returned to Amsterdam, and resumed her simple life, offering spiritual advice to those seeking solace. Finally, she was faced with the ultimate test of her spirit: a diagnosis of a cancer too far advanced for treatment. De Hartog tells us how his mother's blazing courage through it all inspired his own spiritual awakening as he found, in her final months, the strength, the power, and the acceptance to see her through to the end. From the Hardcover edition.

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Title of ebook: A View of the Ocean
ISBN: 9780307498557
parent-ISBN: 9780375424700
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Internet download file size: 1749 kb
Pages: 112
Published: 03-2005
Released online for download: 03-24-2005
Author of eBook: De Hartog, Jan

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A View of the Ocean

Chapter One

Chapter One

My mother died at the age of seventy-nine. She was a gentle, saintly woman who had always seemed somewhat intimidated by her husband and her two sons. My father was a giant of a man, a professor of theology at the University of Amsterdam and a famous Protestant pastor. He could be considered one of the last Victorians, as Holland, up to World War II, was a generation behind the times; social and philosophical problems that had obsessed the world at the turn of the century were still tackled with crusading fervor in Holland in 1925.

My parents first met in 1903 when she was in her early twenties and he was approaching forty. He was a big, swarthy bachelor, pastor of a hamlet in the backwoods of Holland, and one morning he went to visit his uncle—a more dignified clergyman in a neighboring town—riding a bicycle, a big floppy black hat on his head, an umbrella in two saber clamps on the front of the bicycle, and a roll of piano music on its carrier. My mother, as he described it to us later, was sitting in his uncle’s orchard, underneath a flowering cherry tree, dressed in blue shantung with ... read full excerpt from A View of the Ocean ebook

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