Persons [ ] Escape / Confirm / Resemblance / Self-knowledge | Anaïs Nin, 1976
“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art —
we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
“Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness.
Others read to be rescued from it.”
“There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast.
When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men
accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.”
“Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge,
as indispensable as poetry.”
Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, 1976
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
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 travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.*
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.^
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.
Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.
It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before.. to test yout limits.. to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum.
You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.
When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.
I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.
Many couples, many people, are not living with real human beings, but with their ghosts. Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows a beautiful foot, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us, until we choose to unravel the fatal web and free ourselves.
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Stories do not end.
I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.
Anaïs Nin / The Diary / ^Vol. 1: 1931-1934 / *Vol. 7: 1966-1974
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