A View of the Ocean

by Jan De Hartog

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 dro