Geo

“The Paris that Nin described was the world she had created: It was the people she surrounded herself with and the conversations she had—of course there had never been a time when the whole city was like that, but all along, the Paris (and the New York) I’d craved was there, available to those who knew how to look. The magic of Nin and her writing was not just in the world she inhabited, but in the way she saw it, and her determination to see it that way—“I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation,” she wrote. I understood then that the kind of exultant, creative life where everything is art and the “monotony, boredom, death” of “normal” life is kept constantly at bay is not a place that can be traveled to, or a time I missed out on: It’s a way of living and a way of seeing that Nin was a master of, and that I could be, too.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship