I was just cleaning out the notes in my phone and found a to-do list I had made in January.
Item #1 on the list?
Pee.
I don't even know what to say about that.
What I DO know is that I have been reading the diaries of
Anais Nin and cannot get enough of her.
I don't know that I've ever met or heard of any one person who was so different from and so similar to me at the same time. But I find myself soaking up every part of her story, all of her work, and feeling more and more like she's an old friend.
Besides her extensive diary, she is, of course, famous for writing erotica. And for having an affair with
Henry Miller. And for being married to two men, unbeknownst to them, at the same time. I have not yet accomplished any of those things...
(Joke...!)
But in reading her diaries and the way she talks about life and the way she sees people, I feel incredibly connected to her. She would be the answer to the, "If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive..." question. Her compassion and her sense of adventure and her vulnerable
realness are what I want to be and what I want to be surrounded by in life.
She was many things I will never be, want to be, get to be, have to be... but she was so many things that I am and want to be, too.
Some excerpts from Volume One of her diary:
"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is absence of fever, then I shall never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."
about Henry Miller:
"Henry is like a mythical animal. His writing is flamboyant, torrential, chaotic, treacherous, and dangerous. I enjoy the power of his writing, the ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength. This strange mixture of worship of life, enthusiasm, passionate interest in everything, energy, exuberance, laughter, and sudden destructive storms baffles me. Everything is blasted away: hypocrisy, fear, pettiness, falsity. It is as assertion of instinct. He uses the first person, real names; he repudiates order and form and fiction itself. He writes in the uncoordinated way we feel, on various levels at once."
"He thinks I must know a great deal about life because I once posed for painters when I was sixteen. The extent of my innocence would be incredible to him. I tried to look up in the dictionary some of the words he uses, but they were not there."
"He carries one vision of the world as monstrous, and I carry mine. They oppose each other, and also complement each other. If at moments I see the world as he does, will he sometimes see the world as I do?"
from a conversation with Henry about his wife June:
A: Passion and violence never opened a human being.
H: What opens human beings?
A: Compassion. Compassion is the only key I ever found which fits everyone."
So.
You can all go buy copies of her diaries on Amazon now.
And to any artist friends out there: "In Favor of the Sensitive Man" is a quick read, a great collection of her essays, and she has some really fantastic thoughts on art and artists. Do it.
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| They're pretty adorable old friends, aren't they? |
