Best Of Anaïs Nin's, "Early Diary, Volume 4"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from The Early Diary of Anais Nin Volume 4 (1927-1931).
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| Painting above: Woman with a black fan (date unknown) by Gerda Wegener |
Still I cannot forget that there is something wrong with me. It is as if in this complete and deep blossoming of myself which is taking place, the physical is trying to regain its place. I am harder emotionally. I am wide awake, strong, intensely alive, but less idealistic, and my moments of supreme spiritual goodness have gone.
p.1
I am proud of our outwardly beautiful life because our mental life keeps perpetually ahead of it. It is no empty shell--it is the expression of all our ideas, devotions, taste, desires. I feel that each new power that has been put in our hands has been well used. And every new power given us--marriage, house, salary, youth, unity--has been something to conquer, to understand, to control, to keep, to defend and work with. Our progress has been well balanced. Every visible addition has been preceded or accompanied by a spiritual one. I have no fear of wealth. Our hands are firm and strong. We both have capable, sensitive, intelligent hands.
p.3
Every day I find myself melting more and more into the Universal Woman, by my physical attributes, my coquetry, my desire to please, my dancing. I am no longer so naive as to think myself as a separate thing from others, except at moments. These moments when I feel unique, special are: when I am thinking and seeing through myself and through other women; and when I am writing and reading philosophy or conversing intelligently--which are the product of Mind accidentally located in a feminine envelope.
p.35
Every day I feel surer of myself, my desires soar higher, I feel power in myself, conviction. If it is conceit, a vast empty bubble of vanity, an illusion as false as my old modesty was false; If I am deceived, intellectually, by the fireworks of my life, if its ascension is the ascension of self-glory; if there is no spiritual value and philosophical significance to my life, then there is no truth and no sincerity in the world, because no woman ever analyzed her ideas and actions more carefully, none was ever more doubtful of herself, more self-deprecating, more fearful of hypocrisy, more terrified of lies, more eager for truth, than I. You, my Journal, alone, know that.
p.42
A new enemy, or, rather, my oldest enemy attacking me in a different way. Reticence. First of all it was reticence in writing [...] Now it is reticence of physical expression. My real feelings do not come out. In dancing I am gaining a little headway, but I still give an impression of sweetness, of delicacy, not of intensity. I am not free yet. When will I be? I am twenty-five, and not yet a fully matured woman, still “insaissiable” [elusive] and elfin. Savagery, intensity, sorrow are deeply buried behind gentle and timorous manners. What a tiresome struggle! But I have won in writing and will win out in other ways too. I tell everything and let the mask of delicacy, sweetness, and softness drop from my face and from my body.
p.68
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| Painting above: The Ballerina Ulla Poulsen (c.1927) by Gerda Wegener |
The more I misbehave, the more I love Hugh. But the more I flirt, the lovelier I am in the evenings for Hugh. When I lived waiting for him, I was restless and miserable. Now that I live independently during the day, in the evenings I am exactly tuned to Hugh’s mood [...] If he is tired, I don’t mind because I have had my day, and I am contented. He leaves me alone too much. I tried for four years to live only for him and nearly went mad. To wait all day and then to hear about the Bank, to find him preoccupied and tired! He works for our home, our marriage, and me, but also because he likes it [...] I am grateful but not blindly so [....] For four years I gave him all my thoughts, time, and attention. He was happy. Now for a year I have only given him these things occasionally, and he is still happy. He has not missed what I give to others, and this discovery has made me desperate; four years wasted on foolish loyalty. A paradox: by being less good I have become a better wife.
p.75-6
“Do you know my thoughts?”
“Yes.”
I looked at the pine needles on the ground, at the crocuses. Hugh was looking at the snow-capped mountains. The phrase passed, and I let it pass. I never, never want to hurt him. We are so beautifully mated, physically, mentally, temperamentally. But I cannot stay at home. I have a desperate desire to know life, and to live in order to reach maturity. Our marriage has given me but one kind of knowledge. Unless I am mistaken, Hugh, whose mind it always open to new ideas, whose mind tolerates mistakes when they are made in a sincere struggle for truths, Hugh will forgive me.
p.79
What attracts me, tempts me perpetually, is the opportunity to live out a new self--such as I do with Miralles. Women see themselves as in a mirror, in the eyes of the men who love them. I have seen in each man a different woman--and a different life.
p.87
Although I write very little, I have just discovered a new justification of my Journal, a definite use for it. I have discovered that I owe to it much that I am and much of the success of my life. I owe to it what some people owe to psychology: knowledge of myself, extreme consciousness of what in others is vague and unconscious, a knowledge of my desires, of my weaknesses, of my dreams, of my talents. There is more than that to psychology, but in writing about it I am entering an unfamiliar world.
p.95
Why do I resent their comfortableness and plainness? It is none of my business. Little joys, little sorrows, little desires, little lives. They are afraid of analysis, afraid of thought, afraid of restlessness; they have chosen placidity and stagnation. Meanwhile, Hugh and I are getting our wits sharpened by our uncomfortable lives [...] I have my peaceful days, when I’m tired, when the rain depresses me, but as a rule I have all the defects of Guinevere without her looks, and I am certainly one of the troublesome women of the world. How do I get away with it? Mild manners that betray in no way my nature, nice dresses that divert attention from my restless intelligence, and the habit of writing more than I talk, which makes me altogether harmless.
p.112
Together, Hugh and I came to this: all writing is an extension of one’s self [...] let the Journal be the extension, and I will go on writing more harmfully than I live. Reticence in writing induces reticence in living. Freedom in writing induces free living. Overfree living will force my writing into reticence again. Meanwhile, Hugh gets sad. “I want to be your only friend. My work means nothing to me. You alone mean anything to me.” I have been a perfect wife for five years. What am I now?
p.131
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| Painting above: Portrait of Brigitte Bergman (date unknown) by Gerda Wegener |
Joaquin looks at me with reproachful eyes. “ I don’t like you these days. You are too flippant, too clever, too worldly, too frivolous.”
I can’t endure his not understanding. I try to explain: It is a phase. I am conscious of what I am going through. I am conscious of the end. I haven’t lost my ideals. Be patient.
He is younger than I am. I was like him at his age. I can’t go back just to be with him. I must go forward all alone; I must have confidence in myself, in the life which pushes me, in the openness of my mind, in the impulses of my imagination.
I knew what I was doing when I went out in Havana society though Charles thought I was being blinded. I have never been blind. I must go in and through everything. I like to feel myself not on the shore, watching the boats sailing away, but in the sea, fighting the waves. Gilbert thinks I am dazzled by the superficial world, because I can’t conceive now of desert islands with books, ink, and the prospect of a withered yellow face. I have already been a savage on a desert island (Richmond Hill). I have loved with books, bathed in ink, worshipped the inward life blindly; I have renounced half the beauty of the world (when I slapped the faces of men who desired me). I have been the most chaste woman, the most desperate dreamer, the most innocent child, the most self-effacing sister, the most obedient daughter, the most virtuous of housewives. I feared to hurt, to disturb, to take up too much room; I left defiance , rebellion to noisier, bigger people. I had enough with being loved.
Today I am a woman. I defy the hate, the criticism, the envy, the scandalized faces around me. Even Joaquin’s eyes can’t stop me, though they hurt. I have my dream. I’ll follow it alone, always, against the world. I haven’t much self-confidence. It is the same with my dancing. Miralles thinks I am a star. I have been offered a job at Cafe de Paris. Yet I was thinking of starting as a chorus girl. At least Hugh gives me permission to try the stage. Joaquin does not. Mother looks worried.
p.132-133 (entire November 5, 1928 entry)
Here is my pretty ear, my help, my companionship. But no man, either weak or strong, dreamer or realist, can endure a woman who belongs to herself.
p.134
Did I talk this way when I was twenty? I was then getting married, emancipating myself.
p.155
I will never give myself entirely to anything. I will never escape from myself, neither by love, by maternity, by art. My “I” is like the God of the weak faithful who see Him everywhere, always, and can never escape the vision that haunts them.
p.199
Why was I so anxious for perfection that I constantly put myself on trial? Am I sincere? Am I whole? Do I know what is worthwhile? It is just a shade of difference which separates me from the sophists, the sentimentalists, the poseurs, the egoists. It is so easy to slip into these things...
p.218
Hugh’s ideas is that the test of a great love is endurance. There is no other way of telling.
Then what I have for him is a great love. It surpasses , outlasts, everything else. I haven’t doubted, one second, the ultimate strength of it. Other feelings have passed through it without affecting it. It is almost religious, mystical.
p.224
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| Image above: Illustration Plate 183 from Journal des Dames et des Mondes (c. August 1914) by Gerda Wegener |
What I endure very badly are comparisons. I am proud enough to believe that I am a strong entity and should be blamed or praised as such. It isn't a cult of myself, because on the whole I know both my gifts and my defects too well, but, rather, a cult of my individuality, which I have painfully nursed and fostered, risking ignorance by giving up education which happened to conflict with my ideals, respecting no opinion my mind would not absorb, preferring to rediscover all theories and facts myself, preferring loneliness to inferior friends, being throughout bravely myself with a true thirst for progress. Why should I be more difficult to understand than Helen of Troy? Or Guinevere?
p.232-233
This universal loneliness begins to show to me its ironic sides; its universality is a comic paradox. In Havana I know two women groping and starving, yet they are not friends. Probably unconsciously they do not want it. Solitude has its strength. Yet so has love, as Frank says, and to possess strength, will power, is not enough. Love is a transfigurer. I know that. That is why, though I fold myself up into myself, grow inwardly instead of outwardly, cultivate my independence and self-sufficiency, I do not cease to love, to love unwisely and fervently.
p.264
I could only prove how precious he is to me, how profound and infinite is my imperfect and human love for him, if he should die, because I know that I would not live without him one moment. And I know now that my love will be whole and complete and that I shall struggle to make it so---that his image, his being in me is irrevocable, eternal, that we have mingled beyond dissolution, that in my fitful way there is a consistency and a loyalty, because I always worship him even when I do not desire him.
p.266
Coming soon to my human birthday, twenty-seven years. I refuse to make a balance sheet. I’ve done great things this year, artistically speaking, that’s all. I’ve also made mistakes. Have learned to do without friends. I believe in will power. I believe in myself. Amen.
p.283
To each other alone we are no mystery, except for the fascinating mystery of our constant growth; and each in his own way, Hugh’s firm, mine tottering, we go on, awaiting an ultimate splendour.
p.294-295
I’m very happy when I write. And I worship this place, where my mind fairly blazes, where I feel my strength, my individuality, my solitude.
p.295
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| Painting above: Portrait of a young woman (date unknown) by Gerda Wegener |
In Caux, I have always found my own strength. I live there in intense clarity. The true size and relation of things appear exact. There, experiments appeared futile and unworthy in the face of such divination as was possible to a woman like the Mad Fairy. Like her, I shall be able to sense all things by the sharpness of my senses, imagination, and passionate feelings. She is an example to me of how concentrated strength (experiments are scattered strength) can achieve heights without bitterness, without narrowness. I shall know by listening, by having the power to listen to others. So many are anxious to pour out their anxiety. Eugenie herself talked out her soul to me because I listened. Oh, the marvel of this liberation, which enables me to love Hugh exclusively, wholly, eternally, as I desire to love him, while yet growing to be what he himself would have me be.
p.298
When I feel a head over them [my friends], then I must struggle to reach what is a head over me--an inhuman, fierce reaching for whatever is higher. I have no feeling of being monstrous, but simply a feeling of power, as of flying in one’s dreams. It is the mere impetus of my flight that carries me off from one place to another--that everlasting torment and ecstasy of growth.
p.299
In spite of my flights--or, rather, within the flights, because we fly together now--Hugh and I are better lovers. After the trip, we rediscovered each other--began, in a sense, a new life. He has understood everything. He said: “Drop me, too, if I am not worthwhile!” But he is the most worthwhile man I know.
p.299
I feel very strange, weak physically, and strong mentally, concentrated and curiously entire. I feel as if I were carrying a baby--this new strength of mine---jealously guarding it, nurturing it, cultivating it, obsessed by it, enslaved by it. I feel so many things growing---my individuality, my confidence; I feel lines of my character growing stronger. I’m really sprouting, springing up, with mixed feelings of tenderness and bitterness, faith and disillusion, hardness and softness. I have never felt so clearly what my Self is--obscurely and stubbornly self-made.
p.302
I will write happy endings, not because of optimism or false idealism, but simply because I am balanced and always see the other side of the case. Mine is a creative philosophy, in spite of my deep sense of sorrow and of futility. I am even beginning to see that the reason and end of our existence are contained within the span of this life, in the multiple climaxes of sensual and intellectual joys. The idea of the ultimate climax is only a kind of urge, which causes growth, only the gathering of many smaller climaxes by which we may arrive at a superior place in Thought---therefore, returning to the abstract we came from. In other words, satisfaction is here.
p.304
It is a positive fact that I must rely on myself entirely now--that I must build up a strong world within myself, so rich and so full that it will be enough. I must find all things in myself, create them. I must reach my own climaxes of strength and creation with my work. I have had too great a need of people; it is a sign of lack in one’s self.
p.304
My Journal is my true source of balance, my great stabilizer. I found it so in my relations with Mother. Yesterday and today, I found my old tenderness and demonstrativeness for her, which has been partly withheld because of the constant struggle between our two strong characters. Often I have wanted to be very loving, but finding Mother in a combative mood has stopped me, just as Mother, finding me so self-reliant and willful, has felt the loss of her “Little Girl.” I found this little girl in my first Journal, my cult of Mother for her courage, Motherliness, and a thousand proofs that she understood the child and was an extraordinary Mother to it. The vision of Mother then took the little wall down--there was no wall, really, just s slight, slight feeling of reserve and watchfulness for our independence. I never thought we could be the same, because Mother wanted the impossible, wanted the little girl, but I am so much myself now, so grown, that I can afford not to assert myself any more and to be soft. A new feeling has come to me, at least, one I want to keep. I am sorry it did not come before, though it was always there when Mother needed it, when she was unhappy or ill. The evocation of my childhood....There is so much one must not forget. We do forget. That is the cause of half our crimes.
p.306-307 (entire entry from June 18, 1930)
Sitting before him [Eduardo] I felt again that deadness enfolding me, and myself becoming a St. Anne, not in the foreground, fleshy, the mother of a child, but in the background, dispensing understanding and feeling and wisdom---the woman who has lived and now looks down intelligently on the beginning of another life, on the doting, over-sweet, over-self-effacing , uninteresting mother. It is St. Anne who lived in the child. St. Anne herself lives expectant, yet knowing, profound, entire. Eduardo would eliminate the mother and child (because to him they are the symbol of the love which has unmanned him) to reach St. Anne the woman.
p.340
A certain amount of experience with the body is necessary to awaken wisdom. But then experience must be discarded for the sake of concentrating strength on artistic work. In other words, he and I have had enough living with our five senses to possess wisdom, and now we can work. This “enough” puzzled and amused me. He had come to the same conclusion as I had, that laughably small experience could be deepened and magnified by the poet and that the process had to be accompanied by a retrenchment of living.
p.375
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| Image above: Portrait of a woman in a black dress (date unknown) by Gerda Wegener |
People think of understanding as a state of grace, whereas understanding is an adroitness of the mind reached by effort and self-development.
p.376
Although instincts may not at the moment be pure they may be transformed into wisdom. It is the transformation which is important. If we could use the standard of the artist we would not be far from the truth. The artist is the only one who transforms. Perhaps [her] life may be measured this.
p.377
I have spent too much time denying myself, and now I accept myself, my shortcomings, my idiosyncrasies, my ways, my peculiar, individualistic mixture. After a visit, I used to say, hot-faced with shame, “I have been too silent.” Now I say, “Well, what of it!” If I am silent it is because I want to be, because there are in me quantities of strange reserves and secrecy, which are due to my habit of confiding and opening only to writing, only to my Journal, or to those I love at chosen moments. Reticence in talk, yes.
p.399
The time for self-creation is never over, but the time for accepting what I am made up of, has come--for out of that, and not out of other people’s qualities, will come my ultimate being and my ultimate creation
p.399
I am a whole woman. I have put my soul into everything my body has done, fearlessly, and that is why I am now so strong, that is why I have not been humiliated. I have not had to deceive myself, have had no need of sophistry, no need of pride to sustain me. I have given, often unwisely, and I have lost nothing!
p.408
I have certainly a nature like a matchbox: when it catches, all the matches burst into flame at once and the box disappears. How to burn my matches one by one and preserve the box is a big problem. A friendship--flash! All the box gone. Dancing--whiff! All the box gone. John--bang! All the box gone. A book--woof! All the box gone. And so on. Then I have to go to the doctor for heart-trouble. In between big events I have to reconstruct the box-rest, deep breathing, relaxation.
p.411
Where life failed to flow, now the fantasies rise like the sea and fill me, fill the void. My world rises, and immense edifice of visions, and stronger each hour.
p.426
For all this I am myself responsible. I inspire that kind of love. My physical and sensual self has not expressed itself through my body, or at least not yet. My body bears the imprint and mold of my first essence: unduly pure and imaginative and poetic. It is not a true expression of my emotions. Witness my efforts at trying to reveal my true nature through literature and the astonishment it caused.
p.443
We talked a little about the harms of so-called ideal love. We had been so revolutionized [...] My phrase “ I love the purity you brought to our marriage” was a relic of the old conventional idealism. Reality of nature, of being, the spontaneous expression of the instincts which are life, are infinitely more valuable.
p.445-446
Why did they behave themselves? How could they behave themselves? What a revealing story. Reserve. Self-restraint. They call it passion. They don’t know what passion is.
p.472
That is what I meant by the psychic force which compels us to live, and which is simply composed of knowledge, thought, the everyday additions we make to the outline of character and ideas. However, if you live on a low basis from day to day, you cannot expect the inspirational outburst to be very wonderful. A creation is not a thing of the moment, instantaneously formed, but very slowly and gradually shaped out of infinitesimally small pieces. We think it is instantaneous because the process is more or less hidden and apparently mysterious. Here at last is the link between art and life which I have been seeking. here is what I meant by saying that the artist’s standards are the only ones we should apply to life when we wish to judge it. Here is what I meant by the ultimate importance, not of experience itself, but of its creative application. I have studied in myself the continuity of the artistic perception carried into life. And it is that I wish to explain and tell others.
p.476
Some people are passively affected by life and all is well. Others are terribly excited by it and must respond in an active way, and here the trouble begins; I must always respond extremely.
You cannot life life according to a pattern. You can only prepare yourself for the unexpected by a long and continuous state of wonder.
p.479
