The Journals of Anais Nin - Volume 4

The Diary of Anaïs Nin #4

by Anaïs Nin

Anais Nin's Journals have been acclaimed internationally, not only for outstanding literary merit but for their documentation of an era and frank portrayal of people, many of whom have become famous.

In the 1930s Anais Nin lived near Paris, and the people she met there represent a cross-section of the artistic life of the past forty years. She writes with subtlety and insight, and often with startling candour, about her relationships and her friends, among them Henry Miller, the poet Antonin Artaud, and the psychiatrist Dr. Otto Ranks.

But the true significance of these Journals lies in the fact that here, for the first time, we have a passionate, detailed and completely candid record of a modern woman writer's journey of self-discovery.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Diary, Classics, Womens, Autobiography

266 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1974

About the author

Writer and diarist, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, Anaïs Nin spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style and collections of erotica, she is best known for her life and times in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I-VII (1966-1980).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%...

Reviews

[Rowena · Rating 5 out of 5]

“An odyssey from inner to outer life. - The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4(1944-1947)

With each diary Anais Nin is gaining in wisdom and digging deeper into subjects that have preoccupied her. Having read the first four of her diaries in just under a year, I can honestly say I'm in no danger or getting bored by them. They always seem so refreshing to me.

The early part of this volume talks about the war. First:

"Bomb attempt on Hitler failed. Depression, discouragement. We had hoped for his death so often."

Then:

"An atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A horror to stun the world. Unbelievable barbarism."

Followed very closely by:

"Second bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This is savagery on such a scale that I cannot believe it."

In this volume, Nin focuses much of her attention on the young, Gore Vidal in particular. It does sound like she was jaded by the people in her own age group . The only person she seemed to understand was Dali, who showed up to a lecture wearing a diving suit.
Nin gives a lot of writing advice, great writing advice really:

“To hold back is an activity which withers, inhibits, and ultimately kills the seeds. When you first surrender your dream, you may feel poor. But the instinct, like that of nature, is to replenish, refecundate. I have found this to be true. The more I write, the more I give, the more I love, the stronger grows the source. The writer is exposing himself in any form, ultimately as we do in love, but it is a risk we must take.”

The diary ends with Nin going on an American road trip. Her descriptions of her experiences are beautiful:

“Standing there stunned by the mass of colours changing in the light, we heard a subtle vibration, a faint symphony of sounds. It was the wind, traveling through changing depths and heights, affected by curves, towers, heights, abysses, issuing prolonged musical whispers.”

A lot of people see Nin as a flake. Perhaps she was but there's no denying that her writing is beautiful and that she valued the important things in life. She lamented the fact that human beings are becoming so impersonal, life becoming more rigid and robotic, and that less and less people are expressing their creativity or appreciating the arts. I think she was spot on there. I don't think she was a perfect person by any means and I was quite troubled by her assumptions on homosexuals. But, as always, I admire and appreciate her honesty, her authenticity, and her striving to understand herself better.

[Pearl · Rating 4 out of 5]

“So today I awakened feeling like a flower, suave, smooth, gentle. I awakened to a pure aloneness that is not loneliness. The typewriter. Work awaiting me. I put on my quilted, ivory-satin housecoat, bought at the thrift shop for five dollars, and went down for the mail”

This is the first volume of the diary that I struggled with. I think it is because Anais’ star is wandering into ages of personal development that I have yet to reach. She’s getting older, more sure of herself and less prone to please, though she keeps her circle full of the young and unformed.

After the war she’s committed to her dream, to her creation of her own world. She’s stubborn in her romantic ideals, and in her loving orientalism which puts her very much at odds with the new America that surrounds her. I thought a lot in this book about cultural appropriation versus appreciation. I appreciate and believe Anais’ whole-hearted love for the mystery of the Other, but I think she is naive to the capitalism behind her contemporaries dips into the near east and African art. Anais does not think in terms of money. She’s often penniless these days, keeping her many ‘children’ afloat, slowly realising that she cannot mother them forever.

Stagnation and social life seem to me to be the two warring elements of this phase. This I understand, having come to a similar point in my own life at the moment. I loved Anais for keeping on trying to create her own bubble within this city, even as she risks becoming a relic in post-war New York City.

I was happy when she drove through the Holland Tunnel and finally left New York. I think she needs different soil to flourish, and I look forward to her next adventures in warmer surrounds, both as a spectator and as a guide.

[Aric Cushing]

Anais Nin's words are like a young girl playing with fox tails on a summer day. Light, beautiful, painful, and so erudite, the honesty makes one question whether anything has every really changed in the human condition.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

"You do not live in reality. Political reality."
"Does your political reality make you understand human beings?"

Four years deep into my commitment to reading Nin's diary (leastwise the parts that make her look clairvoyant and don't open her up to being sued for libel), I've finally figured out what the draw is. Much as people who bark on and on about not owning a television are usually subscribed to 5+ streaming sites and other "lite" versions of the idiot box, while I can't say I've ever purchased a physical copy of a gossip rag, that's basically what this series of nonfictional treatises has been for me. I may only have the faintest glimmer of awareness of whatever thin white rich mogul is the latest splash in the trending pond due to my selective intake of Twitter and co., but when it comes to (white) literary shenanigans of the pre-1950s, I'll take whatever I can get of the Baldwin, the Vidal, the Kavan, and the Barnes. The unfortunate side effect of such a kind of consumption is that, while I mostly more than enjoy myself while the pages are turning, once the show is over and done, all I can think about is how Nin may be a glittering little engagement on many an occasion, but such barely makes up for her being an obdurate, obtuse, obnoxious, and obfuscating little fool just when you think she's learned her lesson. So, while she's still my choice of vehicle when it comes sidewinding around a certain portion of the 20th century Greats™ and all their exploits both exceptional and ribald, it's not like history has given me a lot of tolerable options in that regard. After this work, I'm still rather keen on getting to the next two volumes that I own and tracking down a copy of the very last one that I don't, but man. If there was anyone who would've greatly benefitted from being slapped in the face with the glove of an intrepid queer and challenged to a duel where she would have finally had to put her muster where her mouth was, it would've been Nin.

He, the lonely one, has trusted woman for the first time, and we start the journey of our friendship, as badly loved children who raised themselves, both stronger and weaker by it.

As always, Nin has a great way with words on many an occasion, some of which ring all too true today. (although I had to wonder what the ratio is of pearl to encrustation is when considering the sheer quantity of her writings). Unfortunately, all of that is caked in that kind of bourgeois noxiousness that has both never been powerless in the face of the slow and inevitable starvation of a neighbor's child and never been powerful enough to rescue every single starving adult she comes across. This means that I am forced to pick and choose what to take seriously when it comes to whatever she has to say about pretty much everything, for much as I delight in the sensual rills that her prose plunges into and the famous names and powerful figures that are dropped into her periphery like so many cut diamonds plinked into a bowl of champagne, her absolute refusal to not only connect the dots in the face of the realities of money, history, and habitus, but to continually get away with it, speaks more about her hidden financial resource of a husband than can be erased through even the stringiest amounts of censorship.

Everyone was at home with bottles from which they hoped to extract a gaiety bottled elsewhere.

Of course, such today is more than fine for the typical reader who not only has access to the kind of resources that allows the development of an interest of such a figure as Nin, but also the inclination to pursue her as far as I have, so if you're wondering why you were led into a four star review and been given a two star bemoaning, mark it up to my constant need to qualify when it comes to such highfalutin cultural products such as this. If there were less people getting mad at Nin due to their ingrained puritanism and more criticizing her for LARPing through her life and her acquaintances and getting angry when her "homosexuals" and her "Negroes" and her "Orientals" refuse to fit in the boxes most conducive to her real person fanfiction, I wouldn't feel the need to spend more time critiquing than I do praising. I'm not looking to promote this work, but ensuring that, when a reader approaches this work, they're willing to take the good with the bad and comment on such appropriately. Critical stances that consist purely of cries "problematic" and/or "wholesome" are largely nothing more than the latest whitewashing scheme of sex-negative WASP types, and I have no interest to contributing to yet another puerile dichotomy of those who refuse to interpret their world as more than a mere slant between good and evil.

"I've given up the idea of absorbing you. You're too strong a personality."
"Why should you want to absorb anyone?"

This is the shortest entry in Nin's series of published diaries, which from the first entry gradually decreased in length until this point, after which it will lengthen a tad during the fifth, dramatically shoot up in the sixth, and end in the seventh at the exact same page count as the first. This entry also covers the slimmest portion of years, four in number, than any of the diary entries contain in comparison to volume two's six and especially volume six's twelve, matched only by the first, whose 60% increase in volume can likely be chalked up to the buildup from all the years previous to the first entry. It's not as if Nin didn't revisit many of the personages and topics that I remember majorly occupying the previous volumes, but considering how badly the summary butchers this entry with its "where she defends young writers against the Establishment," aka bourgeoisies-ly queens around and otherwise mewls and pukes about being prevented from establishing healthy emotional bonds with men who are not and never will be interested in fucking her, and its "and her trip across the country in an old Ford to California and Mexico" which occupies the very last 10% of an already short work, I have to wonder how much else was systematically chopped. Vidal was fine and dandy with being mentioned in rather rigorous detail, but the one paragraph she devotes to Baldwin and how she can't become friends with him due to the "politics" of Jim Crow segregation in her new homeland has to make me wonder what other spiels she ranted off on. Anyway, yet another entry full of the kind of juicy details which you have to spend a lot of time ruining your eyesight over dead white boys and girls in order to truly relish, and the fact that I enjoyed myself even throughout all the nonsense doesn't mean I want to lead anyone in under false pretenses. I'm intent on finishing up this particular nonfictional series of Nin's, along with the first entry into her salacious "Unexpurgated" series, but once that's done, it'll take something more momentous than her legacy is probably capable of to draw me back. Like I said, much as her writing truly interests me, without her coterie of other notables, I'm doubtful I have stomached her la la wonderland "everything is Freud and nothing is Marx" paradigm as long as I have, or commit myself to another four years, at least, of revisits to her writing. An interesting figure of the 20th century, to be sure. But it's unlikely such would have been the case had she not acclimated so well to being bought and paid for throughout it.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quotation: "The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision."

Prescient. What would she make of Twitter?

Nin's observations on cynicism and romanticism, the loss of human interaction as we attempt to connect to more and more people, and the nature of analysis as pulling apart rather than synthesizing, are very resonant. She looked for warmth, passion and humanity uncalloused by life, materialism, grandiosity. Some of her observations are homophobic, or at least classifying of "the homosexual" as a homogeneous group. Her struggles with other famous artists of her time are fascinating, as are her self-doubt and her simultaneous self-knowledge. She knew what she was drawn to in others and tried to surround herself with it. Her concept of "emotional reality" is something greatly lacking in contemporary writing.

[lucía linares · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Una odisea de la vida interior a la vida exterior"

Cada vez que me leo un diario de Anais recupero el amor por la vida por la escritura el arte y por el propio amor. Nadie entiende Todo mejor que ella. Este en concreto es menos maravilloso por el ambiente en el que se ve obligada a vivir (devolvédmela al romanticismo de Francia ya!!!) y porque siento que ha dejado el diario un poco de lado: bien por ella porque estaba neurótica viva pero fatal para mí.
Y como siempre única pega que no entiendo como esta mujer puede estar viviendo en el culmen de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y not give a single fuck about la política es muy puto fuerte el nivel de vivir ya no en una torre de marfil sino fuera de este mundo. Aún así idc la amo más que a mi misma

"Quiero que el significado penetre en el cuerpo por un camino distinto al de la mente. No escribo con la mente. Frances quiere que mi espíritu se manifieste para razonar. Pero yo prefiero estar sumergida en una sinfonía y que el universo se convierta en mi cabeza en un mundo de imágenes y música. Los escritos, durante mucho tiempo, han carecido de poder mágico. En mí converge todo el amor y el cuerpo, el cielo y el infierno, el sueño y la acción. No existe desmembración analítica ni separación de elementos. Como mujer, uniré todo lo que ha sido dividido y haré revivir todo lo que ha perecido"

"Las habitaciones interiores del alma son como la caja negra del fotógrafo, como un laboratorio. No se puede permanecer en ella siempre, porque se desembocaría en la neurosis. Conozco a algunos que acumulan toda su energía en ellos mismos, replegándose en su interior, y entonces todos los sentidos, el oído, la vista, el tacto, se atrofian. La comunicación se para. Se marchitan."

"El esfuerzo de la mujer para encontrar su propia psicología y significación, en contra con la psicología e interpretación creadas por el hombre. La mujer que encuentra su propio lenguaje y expresa sus propios sentimientos, que descubre sus propias sensaciones. El papel de la mujer es la reconstrucción del mundo"

"Yo me he concentrado tanto en mi sexto sentido, que he desarrollado una visión que va más allá de los hechos reales, con el propósito de experimentar nuevas sensaciones. Es posible que jamás haya aprendido los nombres de los pájaros, para poder luego descubrir el pájaro de la paz, el pájaro del paraíso, el pájaro del alma y el pájaro del deseo"

"Lo bello en mi vida es que yo vivo lo que los demás sueñan, comentan y analizan. Quiero seguir viviendo sueños sin censura, el libre inconsciente."

"Me gusta vivir siempre el principio de la vida, no el final. Todos perdemos una parte de nuestra esperanza, oprimidos por la locura de nuestros gobernantes, la incoherencia y la crueldad patológica de la vida cotidiana. Mi naturaleza me empuja siempre a empezar, a creer de nuevo"

"El artista empieza a crear únicamente cuando alcanza una gran riqueza espiritual: es necesario, pues, que aprendas a absorber, a impregnarte, a nutrirte, sin miedo a hartarte. La plenitud es como un mar de fondo que te lleva irresistiblemente hacia la experiencia y la escritura. Déjate llevar y desbordar, deja aumentar la fiebre, acepta todos los desahogos, todas las intensificaciones. El exceso crea siempre alguna cosa: el gran arte nació del terror, de la soledad, de la inhibición, de la inestabilidad, y siempre los compensa. Si crees que yo evoluciono en un mundo de seguridad tú, por contrario, debes aprovecharte del gran privilegio de la juventud, que consiste en evolucionar en un mundo de misterio"

"Son las pequeñas cosas las portadoras de la felicidad. Los grandes hechos son trágicos. No obstante, esta mañana, una hoja ha entrado por la ventana, como transportada por los rayos del sol, un pájaro se ha posado en las escaleras del incendio. Hay alegría en el sabor del café, y me siento alegre mientras me dirijo a la imprenta. El secreto de la felicidad reside en el control de las penas."

(Respecto el revelar los sueños, hacerlos públicos): "Es como en el amor. Cuanto más das, tanto más recibes, encuentras nuevas fuentes y energías. Retraerse y no expresarlo todo es algo que reseca, inhibe, y al final destruye la siembra. Cuando comunicas tus sueños, al principio te arriesgas a sentirte pobre. Pero el instinto, como el de la naturaleza, es de renovación, de fecundación. Cuanto más escribo más doy, más quiero, más se enriquece mi caudal interior. El escritor al final debe exponerse, como hacemos en el amor, pero es un riesgo que debemos correr"

"El conflicto de mi vida es el de mis novelas: oposición de una fea realidad contra una maravillosa intuición o un sueño de otros mundos. No permitáis al hombre que destruya la ilusión. Oponed al artista al mundo de la autoridad, del poder y de la destrucción / Los artistas con los que vivo no tienen ningún poder en el mundo. Son unos soñadores que crean la belleza"

"La presencia de los jóvenes alivia y transforma el mundo oprimido, definitivo, solidificado, en un mundo fluido, maravilloso en potencia, variable y maleable. Es un mundo todavía inexistente. Yo los llamo los niños transparentes / La imagen de un mundo opaco que no se puede cambiar en oposición a un mundo transparente a través del cual se ve el espíritu y las posibilidades de cambio y creación"

"La analogía que existe entre el artista y el niño se debe a que ambos viven en un mundo fraguado por ellos mismos. Este mundo entra en seguido en conflicto con el mundo exterior. El artista y el niño crean un mundo interior regido por sus fantasías y sueños, y no entienden el mundo del dinero y las ansias del poder."

"Soy consciente de que amo y busco ilusiones evanescentes y fugitivas. Lo que debería ser, y no lo que es, esto es lo que me interesa. Unas ideas, unas experiencias, unos ideales reflejados, pero deformados por unos sueños. Igualmente creados por sueños"

"El mayor sufrimiento no lo ocasionan ni la vida, ni los sueños inaccesibles como los de Don Quijote, sino el DESPERTAR" (el sufrimiento de perder el enamoramiento es despertar!!!!)

"Mientras la neurosis domine, toda la vida se convierte en una pieza simbólica. La infancia crea una serie de personajes que se convierten en mitos: cada correlación sirve para caracterizarlos. ¿Quién no persiguió durante años el encanto de un timbre de voz particular, de una voz a otra, como el brujo persigue un bonito pie, sin distinguir a la misma mujer? Una voz, una boca, unos ojos, todos derivan de la fuente original de nuestro primer deseo, orientándola, y nos esclavizan, hasta que decidimos desenredar la trama fatídica y liberarnos. La historia de la liberación total no aparece aún en este volumen. Estoy todavía en un laberinto, y tengo que aceptar perderme antes de salvarme. Solo cuando me abandone a mí misma me salvaré"

"Moriré siendo poeta, asesinada por los que no lo son, no renunciaré a ningún sueño, no me resignaré a ninguna fealdad, no aceptaré nada de otro mundo, que no sea aquel que yo misma he construido. He escrito, vivido y amado como Don Quijote, y el día de mi muerte diré "Que me perdonen, todo esto ha sido un sueño" y entonces, acaso, encuentre a alguien que me conteste: No es cierto; todo ha sido verdad, absolutamente verdad"

[liz ⁀➷ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

astonishing beautiful way of with words

[daisie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I will never settle down, never have a home. My symbol is a roving ship. I am a writer. I would rather have been a courtesan. The rest is in the diary.”

Whilst Nin invites us into her mind, the diary is also a time capsule to the 1940s New York Boheme scene. writers, dancers, film makers, artists and intellects. Nin knew and wrote of everyone: Truman Capote, picasso’s mistress, Gore Vidal…… the index of people mentioned is more than 10 pages long.

Stories of her travels, her parties, her writing.
She herself is fascinating, Intellectual, irresistible. From now on, when I’m asked who I would have at my dinner party, dead or alive, I’ll say anais Nin.

“I change everyday, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles…. I create a myth and a legend, a lie, a fairytale, a magical world.”

[ania · Rating 5 out of 5]

a return to the dream

[Juanma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hace mucho tenia ganas de leer este libro por un artículo que escribio Maria Popova (Brainpicker) acerca de este volume de los diarios de Nin, que tenia la siguiente cita: “Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them.” Últimamente los diarios y compendios de cartas de los escritores me atraen mucho.

Las siguientes notas fueron tomadas de este libro:

• "Every time our hope for a better world is based on a system, this system collapses, due to the corruptibility and imperfection of human beings. I believe we have to go back and work at the growth of human beings, so they will not need systems, but will know how to rule themselves.
• Now you have suffered the shock of disillusion in an ideology which has betrayed its ideals. It is a good time to return to the creation of yourself, not as a blind number in a group, but as an individual.
• The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic. I know some who draw all their energy inward, coiled within themselves, and then all the senses—ears, eyes, touch—become atrophied. Communication stops. They shrivel.
• My only strength is the strength of wholeness, of total feeling. That is what I am writing with.
• Bomb attempt on Hitler failed. Depression, discouragement. We had hoped for his death so often.
• She left us, saying: "There is very little food in the icebox. You will be sorry." We decided to sit around the kitchen table and spend the evening reading Finnegans Wake aloud. Charles read the banquet scene. We savored every word as if it were food. We found the sounds delectable. When Moira returned, she found us sitting contentedly, still reading, and not suffering from hunger.
• Liberation of France! JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. Such joy, such happiness at the hope of war ending. Happiness in unison with the world. Delirious happiness.
• I received a telephone call from Harry Herkovitz. He said: "I am waiting downstairs with a gun. I'm going to kill you." "You can't force people to love, Harry. I have been a good friend. Your girl loves you deeply, and that is rare to find." "I'm going to kill you." "I will call the police."
• We are never trapped unless we choose to be.
• I saw art as a drug, the only drug left to me now that I am losing illusion.
• I thought Virginia Woolf had gone as far as anyone in portraying delicate human emotions, but you've gone a head above her. Her emotions are always too refined. She never gets any earth or good wholesome sensuality into her work and you have got both. This style of yours gives you wonderful scope for going beyond even D. H. Lawrence at his best in the portrayal of the unusual and delicate human relationships.
• A snowstorm. I was working on This Hunger, when my typewriter broke down. I went out into the snow with it to get it repaired. When I came back, I did not feel like writing the continuation of Djuna's life at the orphan asylum and her hunger. I felt like writing about snow. I wrote every image, every sensation, every fantasy I had experienced during my walk. The snowstorm had thrown me back into the past, into my innocent adolescence, surrounded by desires, at sixteen, intimidated, tense. I compared my adolescence with the frozen adolescence of others around me today. They all fused: snow, the frost of fear, the ice of virginity, purity, innocence, and always the sudden danger of melting.
• Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
• The nearness of the Russians to Berlin—ninety miles—is the feverish theme of all our talks and interest. A terrifying moment for the world.
• I am writing, loving, and choose to believe the letters I receive rather than the sour reviewers.
• The ear is purer than the eye, which reads only relative meaning into words. Whereas the distillation of experience into pure sound, a state of music, is timeless and absolute.
• Any dependence causes anxiety. Because one is living through another and fears the loss of the other.
• It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean.
• Of all the elements which stay in my memory, the most vivid is his curious luminosity. Why does it appear in children and adolescents, and then vanish? Is it the presence of the spirit? Is it that the skin, the flesh, is still transparent, not dense and opaque?
• Formal German surrender signed. The war in Europe is over. A date to remember: May 8, 1945.
• Long ago I had discussed with Dr. Otto Rank what he called "the Double," which is another expression of our need to project a part of ourselves onto others. Dr. Esther Harding talked about this most clearly one evening. I took notes. We play a persona role to the world. The acceptance of this social role delivers us to the demands of the collective, and makes us a stranger to our own reality. The consequent split in the personality may find the ego in agreement with general community expectations, while the re-pressed shadow turns dissenter. Failure to acknowledge this dark alter ego creates the tendency to project it onto someone in the immediate environment, the mirror-opposite to one's self. This redeems the masked self from total annihilation.
• Try to write in your diary to keep that little flame burning. Expand, open, speak, name, describe, exclaim, paint, caricature, dance, jump in your writing. We are here as writers to say everything. Speak for your moods, make your muteness and silence eloquent.
• The great beauty of my life is that I live out what others only dream about, talk about, analyze. I want to go on living the uncensored dream, the free unconscious.
• I read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. "An emotion is pure whenever it takes up your whole being."
• America suffers from too much realism, too much Dreiserism, too many Hemingways and Thomas Wolfes. My passion is for freedom from contingencies, from statistics, from literalness, from photographic descriptions.
• The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
• The value of Henry Miller is not at all in spiritual or moral qualities, but in his shattering of Puritan crystallizations.
• There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
• I feel the prime morality of literature should be to teach how to live, expand physically and mentally, how to experience, see, hear, feel, and give birth simultaneously to the soul and the body.
• No one can live with only a clinical, psychological, or historical vision of the world. There must be a capacity to recreate, renovate, renew.
• too much lucidity creates a desert, and one has to find water again, to replant, reseed.
• "You make me lose a certain order," he said.
• Why do people have confidence in their little conscious world, and such fear of the much deeper and larger one below consciousness?
• To write means to give all. No withholding is possible. The best writers are those who give all. However, there is the choice of clothing: fiction, symbolism, poetry, etc.
• I agree with you that a dream given is no longer yours, but it is also true that the more dreams you give, the more you exercise the production of dreams to fill the void, and this faculty grows stronger as you make demands upon it.
• To hold back is an activity which withers, inhibits, and ultimately kills the seeds.
• The more I write, the more I give, the more I love, the stronger grows the source. The writer is exposing himself in any form, ultimately, as we do in love, but it is a risk we must take.
• As I can only write well about what I feel, I have had to find a way to relate what I see and feel to the book, rather than the other way around.
• Not easy to achieve freedom without chaos.
• An atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A horror to stun the world. Unbelievable barbarism.
• Japan surrendered. It seems unbelievable that we can go on living, loving, working, in a world so monstrous, and this because we do not know how to curb the savagery of war, how to control history. That is why I hate history, because it makes man feel helpless in the strangle hold of hatred. More wars. More wars. More destruction. More horrible ways to destroy human beings. What can we do? Because we feel we have no say in all this, we turn away. Those who talk politics all day and all night have not solved anything.
• I can always bring forth proofs of the incident which inspired the character or place, but in order to capture emotion, the reality of how we feel or see the world, I have to go beyond appearance, and then it takes on the quality of a dream; but it is not a dream, it is the way our interior life is lived.
• We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings.
• We do not pay attention, because we only pay attention to headlines and the press.
• Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
• I react against the plain, the one-dimensional men. I will not name them. I meet them everywhere, prosaic, down-to-earth, always talking of politics, never for one moment in the world of music or pleasure, never free of the weight of daily problems, never joyous, never elated, made of either concrete and steel or like work horses, indifferent to their bodies, obsessed with power.
• I have withstood the obsession with politics because I do not believe any system will make man less cruel or less greedy. He has to do this himself, individually.
• He wanted me to help him reconstruct his life, to help him choose a couch, wanted to talk with me. But I wanted to leave.
• The next day I had a cold. Edmund Wilson sent flowers, and a set of Jane Austen, with a note. He was hoping I would learn how to write a novel from reading her! But I am not an imitator of past styles.
• I do not like wrestling matches, I do not like talk marathons, I do not like arguments, or struggles to convert others. I seek harmony.
• I have a hostility toward authority, money, the organization of the world.
• I fear restrictions. I live by impulse and improvisation, and want to write the same way.
• The artists I live with have no power in the world. They are the dreamers, who create beauty.
• Force, authority, power. They are uncreative. I have a right to elude them.
• The analogy between the artist and the child is that both live in a world of their own making. This world soon enters into conflict with the outside world.
• Both the artist and the child create an inner world ruled by their fantasies or dreams. They do not understand the world of money, or the pursuit of power. They create without commercial intent. They rebel against existing conditions. They cannot be deceived. The realistic world for them is ruled by conscious compromises, self-betrayals, selling out.
• Fowlie wrote somewhere, too, that the poet was the one in whom the child's sensitivity survived in the adult, and that it was from this source that he wrote poetry.
• Publishers are calling me. I am supposed to see Random House, Harper's, and Pascal Covici, of Viking. I am both happy and sad. I do not like their world, their values.
• The struggle with money and the press is nothing compared with the more subtle struggle against accepting money for compromising.
• "Yes, we absolutely want you. You have great talent. But do you think the next book might be ... more of a novel ... according to orthodox forms?" "No," I said. "It will be done in my own way."
• "That's just what I want," said Mr. Covici, "collision with the earth. I want you more earthy." "You'll have to wait for that," I said. "Oh," he groaned, "can't you write a novel like everybody else, with a beginning and an end?" "No."
• The real Anai's is in the diary. Even the destructive Anai's who refuses to destroy in life.
• I like casual relationships. When you are involved you get hurt."
• Also, I prefer to break a dish after I eat, rather than wash it.
• This morning, late, he called: "Guess what I am doing? We are sitting here reading Under a Glass Bell." "Who is we?" "Truman Capote." "Do you like the stories?" "We love them. He loves them."
• The writing I do has created a world which draws into it the people I want to live with, who want to live in my world. One can make a world out of paper and ink and words. They make good constructions, habitable refuges, with overdoses of oxygen.
• a change of system would not cure mankind of war and greed. That the only solution was each man working upon himself, his individual discipline against hostility, prejudice and distortion of others, where the evil begins.
• The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.
• I take a far more unexplored world, that of neurosis, and I want to picture the drama which the psychologist struggles with every day: a world of diffused vision, broken connections, symbolic dramas in which the psychic vision creates totally different and elusive problems.
• As it is in moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most deeply, I choose to write more often about such moments.
• Novels of the past dealt either with classic objectivity, or accepted the subjective irrational but never clarified it. To write about human beings struggling for food is wonderful. But it is also necessary to become aware of our collective neurosis, to explore it, to seek to bring back into the world the one who has detached himself from it and is suffering from alienation.
• "The best attack is to continue to work. To do better and better work, that is where to put my energy. I cannot make Trilling more subtle or more understanding."
• "Be careful not to enter the world with any need to seduce, charm, conquer what you do not really want only for the sake of approval.
• We project the unbearable self onto others, so that we can hate it in others and destroy it.
• There is a game and play in the children's world which is a training ground for fantasy and imagination. When this is not killed in childhood it creates the artist and the inventor.
• Anger is a prelude to power.
• I look at writing as a natural, spontaneous thing, like a torrent. When I see a very meager stream, hesitations, difficulties, premeditations, preparations, and much talk, I know the source is poor.
• The most important problem for the novelist is that each generation must create its own reality and its own language, its own images. Each one of us must re-create the world.
• was Henry James himself who said that if you describe a house too completely, too concretely, objectively, solidly, in every detail, then it becomes impossible for the imagination to conceive of what might happen there. The character of the house overshadows events, creates its own associations with peripheral atmospheres (time, place, history, architecture). The reality of the house swallows the canvas and the storyteller.
• Ultimate giving is fatal. I split, split, split, into a million small relationships. And I seek split beings. Divided beings.
• It is not enough to be told that a poem is good, one must feel it is good without influence.
• Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.
• Writing for me is not an art. There is no separation between my life and my craft, my work. The form of art is the form of art of my life, and my life is the form of the art. I refuse artificial patterns. Stories do not end. A point of view changes every moment. Reality changes. It is relative.
• I must be willing to get lost before I am saved. It is only when I abandon myself that I am saved.
• At other times we would meet downtown at Grand Street, in front of the shops selling wedding dresses. A surrealist setting, amidst grim, tall, inhuman buildings, dirty streets filled with broken bottles and garbage, with alcoholics sleeping in the doorways, in attitudes which seemed more like those of death.
• There is a way of living which makes for greater airiness, space, ease, freedom. It is like an airplane's rise above the storms. It is a way of looking at obstacles as something to overcome; of looking at what defeats us as a monster created by ourselves, within ourselves, by our fears, and therefore dissolvable and transformable.
• The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.
• "If you don't make a lot of money, and he does not make a lot of money, I don't see the sense of it." "There is some sense to it. I love to write. Some people love to read. We may have pleasure out of i Don't you have something you really love to do?"
• But five o'clock is the fatal hour, end of work, beginning of awareness, when the buses are so full you cannot get on, when the taxis will not stop, when the subway is chokingly full, when everyone is running somewhere, when the lovers have chosen each other.
• For me there is no perfection in my own life. Mine is a life of miserable complexity and unhappiness so that my writing is all that I can rely on. Only in it do I find release from my tensions. I have no life besides my language, at least no happy life.
• I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles.
• My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure. I create a myth and a legend, a lie, a fairy tale, a magical world, and one that collapses every day and makes me feel like going the way of Virginia Woolf. I have tried to be not neurotic, not romantic, not destructive, but may be all of these in disguises.
• I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: "Excuse me, it was all a dream," and by that time I may have found one who will say: "Not at all, it was true, absolutely true."
• In my person all my feelings are masked. I cannot speak through myself. I must speak in my writing.
• And I realize most strongly every day that my only relief is one of writing, that if I ever find a human relationship it will have to come by way of writing, the words must create a path, the relation, the contact between myself and the human.
• I shall destroy in my writing everyone I have ever loved,
• cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.
• Why does everyone here believe that by all of us thinking of nothing else but the mechanics of living, of history, we will solve all problems? Sometimes one has to be away to think properly.
• The beauty of the South, luxuriant and intoxicating. Smell of gardenias. New Orleans. Pungent food smells, of herbs and curry, jazz issuing from small cafés, people in the street, relaxed.
• As the door of the plane opened, I felt the warm caressing air which immediately turns one into silk.
• In a corner of the dining room, a Mexican woman in native dress made tortillas on a grill. The gestures of her hands as she moulded the paste were rhythmic and ritualistic.
• The next morning, the sun seemed not only to cover everything with gold but to penetrate into my very body.

[Dion Anja · Rating 4 out of 5]

an idea to write/think about later: keeping diaries with the hope of publishing them, the anticipation/desire for an audience.

[isa · Rating 3 out of 5]

personal odyssey spanning WW2 to petty love to traveling America

[ariella · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualize. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive instruments of discovery.”


maybe my favorite so far

[Dawn Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

She is my inspiration and these are books I continually reference when I need to be reminded of why writing is my soul ...

[Rosanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dal singolare al plurale. Anais è a New York, attende la fine della guerra, scrive, segue e sostiene i suoi ‘bambini trasparenti’ (pag. 130), cercando di ricreare il 'grembo culturale’ parigino. E’ donna-chioccia, no, di luce. ascolta, nutre, legge e a volte, con sincerità spietata, mette gli altri di fronte a se stessi, anche a se stessa.
Vi sono nomi su nomi, persone attirate dal suo vivere, molti le fanno da specchio per cui la sua ‘stanza’ pare sempre illuminata, che ci sia il sole o la luna.
Non le piace l’America, capace di impermeabilizzare i sentimenti, dove c’è tanta politica ma poca attenzione all’interiorità dell’individuo e soffre di questo, ha occhi poetici e vorrebbe nutrirsi di tutto ciò che è poesia in ogni attimo, sentirsene gravida per poi partorire parole e significati, tutti quelli possibili. si circonda di giovani, quei suoi bambini trasparenti, per non morire di dolore nel periodo peggiore della Storia umana. Sa dell’ineluttabilità della guerra, conosce il ‘sistema’ che ci conduce ad essa come animali al macello, pone sempre in primo piano l’individuo, la sua ri-costruzione interiore.
Profetica Anais, sì, ma sempre psicoanalista.
Le sue considerazioni sull’omosessualità saranno anche fuori epoca oggi, però sono vissute nel quotidiano, grazie a tutto il gruppo di amici, artisti e non, che amava e l’amavano.
Spuntappunto per me: rileggere il paragrafo ‘Giugno 1946’.
A volte ci sono delle ripetizioni e a volte questo suo scritto diventa racconto, non resta Diario fino in fondo, ciò è dovuto a esigenze editoriali?
Poi comincia questo viaggio per il paese, scoprendone la meraviglia: New Orleans, Little Rock, Arkansas, Oklahoma City, Texas, Utah, il Grand Canyon, Los Angeles.
Incontra gli amici, Miller anche e comprende. Non tutto è detto, questo penso.
Lascio Anais in viaggio ancora, dovrà tornare prima o poi!

Il mondo fisico come simbolo di quello spirituale - pag. 43

Voglio che il significato entri nel corpo per una via diversa dalla mente. Non sto scrivendo con la mente - pag. 62

L’unico che può aprire impunemente il vaso di Pandora è l’artista - pag. 96

Il segreto della gioia è il controllo sul dolore - pag. 99

Storia e politica non sono che la trascrizione dei mali del potere - pag. 108

L'aspetto tragico dell’amore si rivela soltanto quando si cerca di adattare un amore sconfinato a uno limitato. Tutt’intorno a me vedo che un amore non basta, due non bastano. Le donne che conosco cercano di aggiungere un amore all’altro, e quando questo non basta a esaudire i loro bisogni, diventano le ‘grandes amoureuses’ del mondo - pag. 111

L’analogia tra il bambino e l’artista è che entrambi vivono in un mondo di loro creazione - pag. 134

…e ancora…

[✽ ayanna ✽ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few soul-stirring quotes from this gem of a collection:

“The artist finds his way into the most secret, the deepest, and most unconscious self, where lies the real source of creation. Often I think of us as the earth itself, full of hidden treasures, gold, precious stones, fire, metals, or of the riches at the bottom of the sea, all subterranean and having to be brought to the surface.”

“The analogy between the artist and the child is that both live in a world of their own making.”

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. We never discard our childhood. We never escape it completely.”

“Touched bottom again. Decided to liberate myself. We are never trapped unless we choose to be.”

“And yet, the next morning, swimming in the tropical sea, listening to the guitar playing and the singers on the beach, eating the freshly caught fish, drinking coconut milk from a shell, looking at the conch shells brought in by the beach boys, lying in the sun. I remembered that the definition of tropic was “turning,” “changing,” and I felt a new woman would be born here.”

“It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

[Mighty Aphrodite · Rating 5 out of 5]

In questo quarto volume del diario di Anais Nïn siamo nuovamente a New York, mentre la seconda guerra mondiale è ancora in corso e rimane un’eco ben tangibile all’interno delle pagine dell’autrice americana.

Ciò che è cambiato davvero non è lo scenario nel quale Nïn si muove, vive, crea; ciò che è radicalmente mutato è l’animo della donna, più consapevole e deciso a difendersi dagli attacchi esterni. Nonostante non abbia mai imparato a sfoderare gli artigli, ora riconosce i meccanismi distruttivi che governavano le sue scelte e i suoi rapporti con gli altri ed è pronta a fare un passo indietro, a rimanere fedele alla propria profondità in un mondo che – invece – è sempre più diviso e frammentario.

Ancora una volta è il suo rapporto con l’uomo ad essere indagato, esplorato in ogni suo più remoto angolo, scandagliato come le stesse profondità del mare nel quale, ella sostiene, deve trovarsi il paradiso terrestre.

Continua a leggere qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...

[Juliana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quotes:

"Olga had given herself to a cause, a system: this system and cause had failed. While she gave herself, her own development on a deeper level was static.
When the system failed (historically) there was never a question that it may have failed because it was composed of incompleted human beings, human beings who had cease to work on their individual development. And it is this development which I believe will influence history from within, rather than systems. If enough individuals had worked at their own development, history would be formed as natural things are formed, organically, from the impulse of quality and maturity." p9

"Every time our hope for a better world is based on a system, this system collapses, due to the corruptiblity and imperfection of human beings. I believe we have to go back and work at the growth of human beings, so they will not need systems, but will know how to rule themselves. Now you have suffered the shock of disillusion in an ideology which was betreayed its ideals. It is a good time to return to the creation of yourself, not as a blind number in a group, but as an individual. Poetry is merely the language of our highest-self, in which are embedded the seeds of all we do and are in the day. We can only control it by knowing it. Better to make this journey back to what you had first intended than to die of disillusion." p10

"At the same time, because he only has one life, the one he shares with the present, in history, because is not creating an antidote to the poisons of history, Gonzalo has no hope. He is crushed by events. He has no inner life to sustain and alchemize events." p19

"...a pleasure too long awaited is a pleasure lost" p?

"The great beauty of my life is that I live out what others only dream about, talk about, analyze. I want to go on living the uncensored dream, the free unconscious." p62

(In response to a letter to Dali regarding his wearing a diving suit: "We could also wear a miners suit.") "The artist finds his way into the most secret, the deepest, and most unconscious self, where lies the real source of creation. Often I think of us as the Earth itself, full of hidden treasures, gold, precious stones, fire, metals or the of the riches at the bottom of the sea, all subterranean and having to brought to the surface."

"You have not yest discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself...
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings." p65

... Why I can't draw during the school week:
"It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to inbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess; great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them." p65

"It seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. Both must be ruled by faith." p65

"dreams beget dreams"

"...untransformed reality weighs heavily and oppresses the spirit, kills our hope that we may transform, alter, change, evolve. That is the proof of what the imagination can do which gives us our life, hope, joy."

"I always maintained to Olga that a change of system would not cure mankind of war and greed. That the only solution was each man working upon himself, his individual discipline against hostility, prejudice and distortion of others, where the evil begins...
Now she is disillusions...she said: "Anais, you were born with a deeper vision. You went into deeper worlds, and they have not failed you. You have found fundamental truths. I went into external worlds of action, and was betrayed by them. I have lost my faith. I have built nothing. All because of my fear of the inner world."

"The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they may not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters, meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked.
This feeling has become a rarity, and rare every day no that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more more, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of bein in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision."

"Man has to be made whole again by passion and faith. Our faith has been displaced from the inner self to something outside of ourselves."

"There is prejudice against subjectivity, because it is believed subjectivity is a narrowing of the vision. But this is no more true than to say objectivity leads to a larger form of life. Nothing leads to a vaster form of life but the capacity to move deeply inward as well as outward. What is important is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but mobility, aliveness, and interrelation between them and between all relationships.
A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies."

[Maite Plazas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un viaje al interior de una escritora sugestiva y pasional, que se propuso, como reflejan sus obras, el reto de indagar en los secretos de la naturaleza humana (sobre todo, la femenina) a través de la poesía y el psicoanálisis. En el Diario IV seguimos los pasos de Nin en Nueva York, su correspondencia y encuentros con otros artistas, así como sus intentos por consolidarse en el panorama editorial americano. Este diario nos deja pasajes fabulosos, que destilan, además de una enorme exhuberancia y precisión, una enorme inspiración vital y literaria.

[🥀 july · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The beauty of this moment is in my freedom. My abundance of love able to live itself out, to keep everyone in a state of romance, to make each hour, each evening, each moment yield up its full-ness. To disperse and dispense tenderness, attentiveness, joy in living."

I was taught that an existence of high quality is made up of many small, beautiful moments. To explore my dreams and find new, beautiful ways to view the world, that one could be many different selves, each one rich beyond measure. I kept falling in love while reading this. Anaïs Nin is an incredible writer. Femme fatale icon.

[c. cansu m. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Strangely enough, I can forgive many things, many acts, many treacheries, many forms of selfishness, exploitation, anything except ugliness in the vision I call cynicism. I think the cynic is the one who projects his inner ugliness onto others. That one trait alienates me completely."

[discorotto]

Review here: https://corridoiolaterale.wordpress.c...

[Sarah Phenix · Rating 5 out of 5]

fire makes coalescence !

[Madame Desmeules]

"L'inconnu était ma boussole. L'inconnu était mon encyclopédie. L'inconnu était ma science et mon progrès."

[Meera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didn’t want it to end — each page a revelation or something relatable

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

"En mí converge todo, el amor y el cuerpo, el cielo y el infierno, el sueño y la acción. (...) Como mujer, uniré todo lo que ha sido dividido y haré revivir todo lo que ha perecido."

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highlights for me include when Anaïs Nin meets Maya Deren, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal. World War II ends. Nin's status as a temporary visitor in the U.S. expires or something, so since she can't go back to France (she doesn't state why), she will have to leave the country and come back as a permanent resident, and this volume ends with her on a road trip out west, then to Acapulco where she recalls the definition of "tropic" to mean "turning" and "changing" and that is where perhaps she will be reborn.

There is this part where Nin and friends are working for Maya Deren's film and someone brings Cokes and hot dogs. Nin is eating a hot dog and someone tells her, "It does not seem right to see you eat hot dogs" and in the diary, Nin writes, "Damn the legend!" (mystification of her) and then, "I was having a carefree time and that remark annoyed me." I thought it was hilarious. I looked at Nin's face on the front cover and could see why it would be hard to imagine her eating a hot dog and drinking a Coke.

Then there is this other part where Anaïs Nin has just published Ladders to Fire and she is touring colleges to give readings and lectures, feeling exhausted but learning to parry criticisms and intellectualizations of her work. She is having dinner and champagne with James Merrill and Kendall (I think) and they're having such a good time that no one really notices when one of them says they smell smoke until Merrill opens a door and sees all this smoke. He's like, Anaïs you call the firemen! I need to collect my manuscripts! So Anaïs calls the fire dept and because of her slight French accent, they believe she's prank calling them! Plus she's had champagne so she passes the phone to Merrill and they laugh at how it all seems like a publicity stunt—to set the house on fire so that they can escape down ladders to promote her book, Ladders to Fire: #LOL but anyhow, it turns out to be some woman downstairs who left her cake in the oven for too long.

I checked out three videos of Anaïs Nin on YouTube after reading the part when she describes hearing her voice played back for the first time, with her accent, tremor, and in one of the videos in which Nin is so calm-looking in a kimono, stirring her cup of coffee, she mentioned that in the fifth volume of the diary—and this is coming from a feminine softly-speaking woman who only moderately drinks and never does drugs—she describes her experience taking LSD and how her entire body was made of gold! I can't wait to read this in the next volume.

[Desca Ang · Rating 3 out of 5]

The review is taken from my Instagram account: @descanto

When the composer Joaquín Nin abandoned the family, his little daughter Anaïs began to write a diary as her coping mechanism. Her collection of diaries later has become her recollection of the past and a memoir of things she could not say.

The journals of Anaïs Nin tells her real portrayal. Most of them deal with her complicated relationship with Henry Miller; her infatuation with the flirtatious June Miller; her strange liaison with Antonin Artaud. She also tells her sessions with the famous René Allendy and Otto Rank, commenting that psychoanalysis does force one to be more truthful and she realise certain feeling she was not aware of and her childhood traumatic experience; her fear of being hurt, unwanted, unloved.

The journals of Anaïs Nin are a good collection of writings which lead people to know Nin for who she is. Some people praise these collections. I personally enjoy reading the first parts of the volumes. Yet after reading the same old stuffs about Henry, Anaïs, and June...it's getting too monotonous and boring. I also have he feeling that these journals were mostly censored or edited which is a lamentable thing. I expect to know a person in a whole when I read such diaries or journals.

[Shayda · Rating 2 out of 5]

The question of how to evaluate the later volumes of the Diary really comes up for me with this one. The editing brings in a host of friends and acquaintances, but Nin's relationships with them seem attenuated (and all of these original volumes were heavily edited, so far as I know). Nin's harping on the value of youth, because of its interest in the new, sounds self-serving at times (she was struggling to keep her fiction in print and to have it understood).

The book description really overstates the prominence of the car trip across the U.S. - it's by far the smallest portion.

[Ashlyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Acapulco - "We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting a new cast for the reproduction fo the same drama. And one day will I open my eyes in this beautiful, overwhelming place and see that I am caught in the same pattern, repeating the same story? I remembered that the definition of tropic was "turning," changing. and I felt a new woman would be born here."