Reading Anais continued

I keep a diary because journaling is supposed to have therapeutic effects. It's supposed to help with depression and various mental illnesses. Recording one's life and being able to look back on it and think about what has happened and why ... this process is supposed to filter out the crazy in one's life. It's introspection and meditation and all those healthy things. One should be able to spot complications in life (falling in love with a married man, starting an affair with one's psychoanalyst, etc) before they take root. Journaling should temper one's more feral instincts, stabilize emotional swings and contribute to living a simple, uncomplicated life.

But secretly, I suspect, journaling only has that effect on people who are by nature temperate and not inclined to do crazy things.

As I'm reading Anais Nin's diary, I get the feeling that she's not being entirely candid. When I started reading, I was awed by how candid her depiction of June Miller is. It's so personal and she admits to being fascinated by June. I was inspired by the idea of this journal, in which someone can shed all of her inhibitions to tell the truth and honestly record all that she thinks, and thus free herself of hidden demons lurking at the back of her mind, that would usually be suppressed. As I read on however, I became more and more aware that this diary was always meant to be read. I can also see that she's not entirely honest with the diary.

In reading her episode with Dr. Allendy, I was hit with the realization that, when she questioned whether or not she was attracted to him, she already knew the answer, which she did not share with her diary. After this realization and casting Anais Nin in the role of an unreliable narrator (like Ishmael), I'm left questioning a lot of things. What does she feel about Henry Miller? Her relationship with him seems to hover between romantic and platonic. Even such a candid, beautifully-written diary suffers from omission and elision.

Diary-writing does not prevent life from being complicated; all the reflection and introspection leads to discovering one's problems, but not to fixing them. In fact, a diary is just a place to think and justify one's actions that might appear to the world as wrong - whereupon, one can live out questionable situations all the more systematically.

Note to self: must find more time to read ... and write in my diary.

Reading Anais Nin

Sometimes, I think I'm a bit whimsical. As I nearly finished cooking dinner today, I was seized with a sudden craving for onion soup. Despite having no idea how onion soup is made, I proceeded to cook and invent a recipe for onion soup out of the contents of my fridge, while eating the dinner that I'd already made.

Yesterday, I was seized with a sudden compulsion to read the diaries of Anais Nin. Exercising great self-restraint, I did not immediately drop my studies and rush to nearby bookstores and libraries in a frenzied book hunt but, instead, waited until wrapping up classes and meetings today to head to the library.

Now, I'm reading volume one of The Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1934). I was completely drawn in on page one; she writes of living in the provincial town where Madame Bovary poisoned herself, of a townsman being one of "Balzac's misers", and of lanes through which Marcel Swann would drive to dinner. Here's another passage that made me stop and reread:

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterly, for instance), or you take a trip [...] and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.

"Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken. But I am not in danger because my home, my garden, my beautiful life do not lull me. I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing."

(Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One)

I liked reading that; I often do feel as if reading a book (Herman Hesse, Demian or, perhaps, The Diary of Anais Nin) or hearing a symphony (The Rite of Spring for one) had the effect of shaking me out of a stupor.

photo at top © 2009 Kay