Thursday, April 11

Emptiness and Nin

I don't have anything clever to say today. I am sorry.
When you're in a good place, emotionally/psychologically, you forget how bad things are when you're not. You forget the empty feeling in your head that grows into a gnawing discontent, then a deep, aching misery. You forget how your soul just doesn't seem to accept joy anymore. Every possible pleasant or useful activity is more work than it's worth, because afterwards you won't feel any better. 
This, too, shall pass.
Right?
I have miles to go before I sleep.


I have, however, restarted the Diary of Anais Nin for... about the tenth time. I always start, fall in love, and then set it down after a hundred pages or so and get distracted for a few years.
It's very beautiful, and very much of the sensual, artistic (yet realistic) beauty that I love about Francesca Lia Block's stories, but through the words and thoughts and life of a person who actually did live and love and was kind of amazing. Anais Nin sought a life of both hard realism and truth, and also the beautiful, ethereal life of sensualism; love and fantasies and beauty.
Her many many journals record her (amazing) thoughts and feelings throughout her life, including about friends, lovers, and life in general. She is kind of my literary hero, and there's no (or at least very little) fiction to it.

To entertain you in my place, I present my favorite lines so far from The Diary of Anais Nin (Volume One, pages 1-46). The bold ones, of course, are my favorite favorites.

"I know that human beings place upon an object, or a person, this responsibility of being the obstacle when the obstacle lies always within one's self."

"I had a sense of preparation for a love to come."

"I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension."

"I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops."

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book ... or you take a trip, or to talk ... and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating."

"...then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."

"I have always believed ... to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels and thinks..."

"She was color and brilliance and strangeness."

"She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself."

"'I will never know again who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me.'"

"'...if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madness."

"...[we] have paid with our souls for taking fantasies seriously, for living life as a theatre..."

"She is a personality expanded to the limit."

"...she walked into my house and I was willing to endure any pain at her hands."

"Our love would be death."

"We were walking above the world, above reality, into pure, pure ecstasy."

"In his love for her he has endured so many torments that the lover took refuge in the writer."

"I have the power to burn like a flame"

"To be fully alive is to live unconsciously and instinctively in all directions..."

"All but freedom, utter freedom, is death."

"I go out into the world to seek life."

"She is so busy just BEING, talking, walking, making love, drinking, that she can achieve nothing else."

"She lives within chaos."

"You cannot possess without loving."


More to come, I'm sure.

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