What Would Anais Do (WWAD)

...they prized their relationship, they gave care to it, time attention ... Both wanted to work at something they loved ... Neither one dominated. Each one worked at what they did best, shared labors, unobtrusively, without need to establish roles or boundaries. The characteristic trait was gentleness. There was no head of the house. There was no need to assert which one was the supplier of income. They had learned the subtle art of oscillation, which is human. Neither strength or weakness is a fixed quality. We all have our days of strength and our days of weakness. They had learned rhythm, suppleness, relativity. Each had knowledge and special intuitions to contribute. There is no war of the sexes between these couples. There is no need to draw up contracts on the rules of marriage ... They are both aware of the function of dreams–not as symptoms of neurosis, but as guidance to our secret nature. They know that each is endowed with both masculine and feminine qualities.

('In Favour of the Sensitive Man', 1974)  __________________________________________

"We are going to the moon, that is not very far.
Man has so much farther to go within himself."

---

When I was working on the diary
I became aware of a wonderful image:
relationships were very much like stellar
constellations--friendships gravitated around
the cities of my life. Paris, New York, Los Angeles.

---

 

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. 

___________________________________________

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all,
there is only the meaning we each give to our life,
an individual meaning, an individual plot,
like an individual novel, a book for each person.

---

There were always in me, two women at least,
one woman desperate and bewildered,
who felt she was drowning and another who
would leap into a scene, as upon a stage,
conceal her true emotions because they
were weaknesses, helplessness, despair,
and present to the world only a smile,
an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.

---

I saw things as a chain and felt that everything
is continuous and never really ends. I had a
sense of continuity and relatedness relatedness
between the past and the present and the future,
between races and between the sexes, between
everything.
Conversations with Anais Nin ( Wendy M. Dubow editor)

What I like best about myself ..is my audacity,
my courage. The ways I have found to be true to
myself without causing too much pain or damage..
What I hate so much is my vanity, my need to shine,
my need of applause and my sentimentality. I would
like to be harder. I cannot make a joke, make fun
of anyone, without feeling regrets.

The diary was once a disease. I do not take it up
now for the same reasons. Before it was because
I was lonely , or because I did not know how to
communicate with others. I needed the communion.
Now it is to write , not for solace but for the pleasure
of describing others, out of abundance.

I have not been unaware of the political drama
going on, but I have not taken any sides because
politics to me, all of them seem rotten to the core
and all based on economics , not humanitarianism.
The suffering of the word seemed to me without
remedy except by what we could give individually.
I did not trust any movement or system...
...nothing changes the nature of man. I know too
well that man can only change himself psychologically,
and that fear and greed make him inhuman, and it
is only a change of roles we attain with each revolution,
just a change of men in power, that is all, the evil remains.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into
truths beyond itself.

Volume Two (1934-1939) The Diary of Anais Nin (These quotes taken from Gunther Stuhlmann's preface)