Best Of Anaïs Nin's "Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love, The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1937-1939).
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| Painting above: L’infante égarée (c.1944) by Marion Adnams |
When Gonzalo talks about ritual the first theatre on the altars of the Catholic Church, the extraordinary fantastic ceremonies full of mystery and grandeur, I feel that I recover a lost world which is beyond my everyday self, the world of my race. When he raves against the vulgarity of the Western world, the scientific epoch, the lack of ritual and significance, I understand. When he fears we are tainted, I understand, tainted with consciousness. But we know deep down we have kept the chalice and an altar, a mystery. I know what passionate affinity attracted me to Fez, what deep roots are stirred in me by the Orient. I had all this sense of form and ritual in the life of dress and symbolism, of continuous significance, and the power of falling into a trance, of moving out of myself by exaltation, away from violence.
p.27-28
I don’t see a lie in idealization. If I have a swollen cheek because a dentist took out a wisdom tooth, I cover my head with a peasant handkerchief, I look like an Aragonesa, the swollen cheek is under a flowered cotton. I show only my brows, eyes, nose, chin. Artifice. Artifice is art, the paradise, the only paradise. Paradise was a place with white-feather pine trees, with fur and mirrors, with glass fishes, veiled lamps, Arabian divans, silk-lined walls, invisible music, dishes shaped like stars, costumes of cellophane. Paradise was artifice. In artifice there is peace, joy, forgetting, enchantment, opium.
p.52
In me love is eternal. A new one is born without destroying the old. The old ones change, alter, but their essence is indestructible.
p.59
Of course, the personal life deeply lived expands to truths beyond itself. My struggles with myself are not valueless. They represent the struggle of thousands. But they lead to the greater one. I don't know.
p.73-74
It is not a foil I seek, it is always the woman who lives entirely by her instincts, in chaos, and like nature. I love that in other women because it represents my own instinctive nature which I hold in check as much as possible, which I seek to transcend by some creative and superior force which makes me not want to destroy others, and all instincts freed are destructive. Having more or less [...] dominated my instincts of possession, power, egotism, enslaving, appetite, I like to see it--the whole jungle--in other women. I don’t like superior women, I like the jungle.
p.75
My feeling for women’s inarticulateness is reawakened by Nancy’s stuttering, stumbling loyalty to me as the one who does not betray woman but expresses her.
p.83
My tragedy is that I love deeply but I cannot live with anyone. I don’t yield. Part of me always remains Anaïs Nin, rigid, like myself [...] I have doubts about people who say: I talked, lived, like Montparnasse. As Heinz says: “When I was poor and worked in restaurants I thought and felt like those I worked with.” Not me. I was never anyone but myself when I posed or modelled. I could not be. I play roles but they resemble me, no one else.
p.98
As to politics--I’m through. Too immediate for me, too ugly, too homely, petty, and false. I shall try to open the path to the literature which should be born of the revolution, I must live ahead, walk ahead, live in the future--with a vision. I have plans to start the new literature--one beyond all laws, as all great artists were. This should be the moment for great creative amorality.
p.99
Perhaps it is a greater agony to live this life in which my awareness makes a thousand circles while others’ makes only one, my span seems smaller and it is really greater because it covers all the obscure routes of the soul and a body confessing themselves. It is my thousand-year-old womanhood I am recording. It would be simpler, shorter, swifter not to give this deepening perspective to my life, and lose myself in the simple world drama of a detective-story intrigues and crimes.
p.125
Theoretically woman always sits at the centre of her being and brings the vaster peripheral activities into the centre. I bring all of Henry’s philosophies and creations into the core of our life. At the centre are my intimate relationships: Gonzalo, Henry, Hugh, Durrell. I never lose sight of those who are on the periphery, do not confuse them with the centre. But Henry has no core. I say to him: “I swung into your peripheral rhythms not to sit alone in the centre as all women do--lamenting. It is not natural to me, but necessary.
p.139
Relationship, I mean satisfaction in it, is not possible for me. I am too absolute. I must work. Today I shut myself in saw no one [...] forgot people and wrote. I take Gonzalo’s visit tonight as pleasure, as delectation, not fixed central vital point of my whole day. I am filled with contentment from my work.
p.152
However, I have other work to do. My work is individual. I have gone too far to make this self a far-off Utopia. I believe now in my own value. I must live this out to the end. But I believe in my own destiny which is not to sacrifice myself to others by my death, but by living. I no longer belong to myself to give myself away--I am a symbol I cannot serve anything that demands obedience, silence, sacrifice. I am not made for an army even if this army may eventually free the poor, the meek, the weak.
p.182
I believe it is not unfaithfulness which drives the grandes amoureuses--but that when you are highly sensitized to love, when you vibrate deeply, sexually, bodily, when you love passionately, then it is like a current in the body which, being perpetual, creates a warm contact with all. I feel so many people physically, amorously, because I am in a state of love, like a mystic, and it is greater than myself, it is immense, the overflow. Just as activity creates activity, energy creates energy, creation leads to creation, so passion creates more and more capacity for passion. The being was enlarged, its capacity highly increased, and you have the answer to the amorous expansion of all born lovers. That is why the word infidelity means nothing to me.
p.192
When Hugo came we threw ourselves into pleasures: we got a radio, a bedcover from Madagascar, a couch cover from Marrakech, an electric heater, papaya jam, sweet potatoes, cranberry, a wine bottle from Mexico, an orange-painted candle, a holy water holder of old Spanish-Moorish pottery, seashells. I gave myself ten days of selfish living told my Father, Maruca, people I was in London. Entrenched myself in the Arabian nights of my home, lit sandalwood sticks, and contemplated my life.
p.284
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| Painting above: Variations on Red (c.1949) by Marion Adnams |
There are people who can’t change from the interior outward, who must be pushed form the exterior. These are the ones who need revolutions. The weak ones. They are those who can’t rise above life, transform it, free themselves, and for these the revolution is necessary, for the weak ones. It’s for the weak and by the weak. That’s why for me personally I have no use for it, but for the other I have. No revolution will free me from my sentimentality, pity, weakness. But it will free those who cannot escape into the infinite, those who cannot create an illusory world. Those who cannot dream, those who cannot transform it.
p.302-3
I believe in order, in the material world, an order among details and trappings which serves the spirit and liberates the dream. If I can find my clothes, my shoes, my face powder and food easily I am free to dream. If the place is in order it is subservient to the dream, self-effacing, obedient. Disorder in the material world hampers motion, magnifies details, is not a liberation but a burden, an obtrusion. To waste time looking for a stocking or a book or a perfume is to be momentarily trammelled, not untrammelled as the Bohemians believe. Thus, for the dream, a subservient order. But this order must not become an end in itself, or else it paralyzes the life motion.
p.331
So I begin each day anew, very simply, as a woman. I powder my face, I paint my eyelashes, I wear a fuchsia tailored coat and black skirt, leather moccasin shoes, a leather Arabian bag slung over one shoulder. I am like a coccinelle walking but refusing to use my wings. I refuse miracles. I do not seek magic. My purple jacket. A hundred brush strokes every day to keep the hair beautiful. I am still walking. I read newspapers. I wish Hugo were leaving because I cannot love him for more than a few weeks at a time [...] I have struggled toward naturalness. I have never adopted or recognized the discipline of la vie mondaine, so that today when I am in the world, I cannot talk according to the ritual, with irony and detachment. I have not the training. I have rejected all who talk and live by these rules, including my Father.
p.354
