March, 1938: Noah's Ark

"Hitler marched into Austria," begins this entry of the Diary of Anais Nin. She is aware of the world around her but has created an "individually perfect world" in which she can continue to influence and guide others and keep her dream alive, escaping the tragedy of daily life. At times she feels weighed down or trapped by the problems of others and the problems of the world, but she is still able to focus on the dream and continue writing Winter of Artifice.

Anais' new houseboat is La Belle Aurore, which she calls "Noah's Ark." She purifies the bookcases, ordains it into order. The simple life nourishes her, makes her happy. She owns little, only what has meaning. As the world crumbles around her, she burns incense in Noah's Ark and forgets everything, feels peace, rescues herself, is safe.

January, 1938: If Anais Were Rich

Anais Nin says if she were rich she would:

1. Send Helba to a sanatorium where she might get well
2. Give Jean a radio-phonograph because he likes to write music
3. Give Henry rare Chinese art books he has been hankering for
4. Pension old Lantelme so he would not work anymore
5. Sustain all Henry's publications
6. Buy a press for herself

She feels poor. She has reduced life to its simplest basis. She waivers between feeling happy and not. She has finished the main cutting of the diary. She works 2-3 hours in the morning, has lunch at one of the little cafes nearby, works 2-3 more hours in the afternoon, has coffee at the Cafe Flore, works more, then has dinner with Henry or Gonzalo. Hugh is in London.

These days, we say, "If I won the lottery, I would..." What would you do? How would you spend your money? It is interesting and telling how Anais says she would spend her money: only one item for herself. She is a giver. Her purpose is living for others.

November, 1937: Conflict

In this entry of her Diary, Anais Nin speaks of how everything is divided into warm or cold. Warm people, like Anais, respond to others and are able to make personal sacrifices for them. Cold people, like Henry, respond out of selfishness, an instinct to reserve the self. Cold people are disconnected from human spontaneity, human feeling, pity, sympathy. Anais feels that she is never cut off, never disconnected. On the other hand, she identifies herself with Don Juan, always wanting to be at the beginning of a relationship, when everything is high and smooth and beautiful, before it starts a natural deterioration. The struggle is in the balancing act and how to be in a long-term relationship, feel empathy for the other person, yet still be an individual.

Gonzalo is fighting for Communism, and Anais, usually one to avoid politics, finds herself caught between the individual world and the collective world. In the past, she has wanted to avoid being a part of a mass movement, but now she begins to understand what Gonzalo is doing, even though at times she feels as though its a lost cause. Should she continue to dream, or should she accept what is real?

October, 1937: Centered

Anais Nin has a center, and she wants to live from this center. She is relationship-centered, views relationship as an art, and her life revolves around intimate friendships and affections. She knows who is at the core - Hugh, Henry, and Gonzalo, and who is at the periphery. Relationships are her lighthouse that governs her growth and happiness. Belonging, acceptance, and popularity are crucial with her peripheral friends; she is fearful of embarrassment or rejection. She yearns to be completely understood as she was by Dr. Rank who made her feel like a princess who did extraordinary things.

Anais is aware that she has peripheral friends who come to her with their troubles, expecting a cure, using her. They drain her, go off happy and satisfied, and leave her depleted, making no contribution to her life. Those at her core disappoint her as well, and at times, she just needs to enter into solitude and take care of her own basic needs. This usually involves writing, editing, re-writing, re-living her diary.

Fall, 1937: Friendships

Anais Nin says in this entry of her Diary that she finds happiness in friendships when they are new. As time goes on, she finds out where they live, what they do, who their spouse and children are, and she sees a different person which causes the friendship to die. The same is true with romantic relationships; when they are new, there is a flare of passion which fades with time.

Do relationships die natural deaths? Do they die from nonacceptance of anothers' flaws and faults? Do they die because the other person is insufficient? Do they die because we form a romantic illusion of a person that is far from reality? No matter how they die, the result is that Anais could end up alone except that she is able to continue to develop new friendships. Anais seems to be intent on following her pursuits, her ideas, her dreams, and because of this, friends come and friends go, but she seems to be fine with that.

August, 1937: Introspection

Anais Nin describes introspection as a monster who chews too long on a morsel, only to achieve mastication and wither all it touches.

During her stay in New York, it was all action, as she had no time for thought or meditation. Thinking too much or thinking of the wrong things or in destructive ways leads to anger, jealously, self-doubt because our imaginations take over. If instead, we seek out intimate friendships, dancing, laughing, talking with others, sleeping, we avoid this constant examination, awareness, consciousness, depression.

Just live, love, become absorbed in the world outside yourself, give yourself up, forget introspection.

Summer, 1937: Luxury

As a child, Anais Nin experienced poverty after her father left his family, and her mother had to make sacrifices after being left on her own with three kids. Anais feels that the fewer possessions she has, the richer she feels, so she seeks poverty, as all real artists do. She's not sure why - does it bring her nearer to spiritual values? Is it because she was born under the sign of Pisces, the giver? She surrenders possessions and luxuries so that those around her can have paper and a typewriter and paint and food so they have hope and life and can create.

She keeps only what is necessary to her creativity. It creates a light atmosphere, order, to have not one useless, superfluous object. She gives away everything she doesn't need so that nothing accumulates or weighs her down. It gives her a religious pleasure to give; she gives with love, and this gives it meaning.

Anais is moving to a cheaper place. She has denied herself vacations, luxuries, and clothes. Sacrifices. Anais feels this is especially difficult for her because she feels her body was built for luxury. Her throat hurts if she smokes a cheap cigarette. She gets sick if she drinks cheap wine. Her skin spoils if she uses cheap beauty products. However, she still has the maid... Some things can't be sacrificed. The maid frees up her time from doing household chores so that she can write in the Diary.

What have you given up and why? What things can't you give up?

March, 1937: Broke but Beautiful

Anais Nin is broke. Her husband gives her an allowance, but by the fourth of the month, it is gone. She is providing for her friends, paying for for rent, doctors, clothes, food. She owns only two pairs of mended stockings, two pairs of worn out shoes. She has no cold cream or face powder. There's no wine, no coal.

Yet, she feels happy and lovely. When you care for people, you are attractive to not only them, but to yourself. Anais has been asking herself since her father told her she was ugly in her youth if she was beautiful. She looked in the mirror, she looked into the eyes of boys and of the painters for whom she modeled. She had a turning point as a model and started to feel beautiful, exotic, different from the others.

Many people, probably women in particular, lack confidence in their youth. By the time they are in their twenties or thirties, they realize they are not so bad, they are okay, and wonder why they were so hard on themselves and had so many doubts when they were younger. All this time worrying and wondering was wasted time, they now realize.

February, 1937: The Diary

Anais Nin has struggled with herself on whether or not to continue the Diary. Some tell her to scrap it so that she can focus on writing novels and fiction, but her intuition tells her to continue it because it is her own personal creation. She views it as her art, which uses her feelings and emotions to create a new form to serve a new purpose. It is similar to other art forms such as painting and sculpture and pottery and architecture and novels and music, all creative products of a person's deepest desires.

Is the Diary an escape? Does it make her and keep her neurotic by allowing her to focus and analyze her life and by giving her the opportunity to re-read it and keep the past in the present because of its being documented? Is it a realistic or idealistic portrayal of her and her life?

We are all myth-makers about ourselves. We are unrecognized creative geniuses, martyrs. We create romantic images of ourselves. Anais Nin is no different.

January, 1937: The Dream

"I mastered the mechanisms of life the better to bend it to the will of the dream. I conquered details to make the dream more possible. With hammer and nails, paint, soap, money, typewriter, cookbook, douche bags, I created a dream. That is why I renounce violence and tragedy. I have made poetry out of science, I took psychoanalysis and made a myth of it. I mastered poverty and restrictions; I lived adroitly, intelligently, critically; I sewed and mended, all for the sake of the dream. I took all the elements of modern life and used them for the dream. I subjected New York to the service of the dream. And now it is all again a question of the dream versus reality. In the dream nobody dies, in the dream no one suffers, no one is sick, nobody suffers," Anais Nin begins this entry of her Diary.

I love this. Anais makes a conscience effort to form and mold her life to match her vision of it. She wants her world to be perfect for her. She wants to "build an individually perfect world." It does take a strong vision and much effort and perseverance to do this. She recognizes that the bigger world can sometimes interfere when things like war or other events out of personal control occur. It makes it hard but not impossible to protect the individual world.

Anais has also become aware with the publication of Henry Miller's works and subsequent notoriety, that she may not be as great a writer as him. She knows the Diary is her form, where she feels most natural. She modifies her dream of becoming a great writer to writing slender little books outside of the Diary and perfecting what is natural, the Diary.

December, 1936: Time

Anais Nin rarely speaks of war in her Diaries, and when she does, she keeps it brief. In this entry of her Diary, it is New Year's Eve, and she has stayed up until 6:30 the next morning. She has a feeling that it could be the last night of drinking, dancing, laughing - the last night of pleasure, and she wants to make the most of it because tomorrow could be war and all the horrors that come with it - cannons, alarms, blood. She wants to drop the mediocre and create an extraordinary life.

Time is one of our precious commodities, and we seem to become aware of that fact only when it is threatened, whether by war or middle age or some other event. We want to have accomplishments, achievements, recognition, pleasures, a life worth having. We want to eliminate waste and the irrelevant and cut back to the essential. We realize it is now or never.

November, 1936: Emotional Attitude

In a letter to one of her patients in New York, Anais Nin speaks of affinity between our emotional attitude towards life and towards love. She quotes Gide: "he can do nothing for the happiness of others who does not know how to be happy himself." She also distinguishes between joy which can be contagious though egotistical and happiness which is deeper and can be given without possessing it.

Anais is happiest whenever she conquers what blocks her and is able to create something in the end. The process of creation itself may not bring happiness; in fact, it can be full of anguish and pain, but working and creating gives strength.This emotional strength, a large part of which is emotional attitude, brings us happiness in life and love.

Happiness usually requires action, activity, not passivity. You may feel happy watching your favorite TV show, but my guess is, you would feel happier in the end if you spent time creating something: a carrot cake, a poem to your lover, a picnic, a handwritten note to your mom, a painting of your girlfriend's favorite place.

October, 1936: Happiness

Anais Nin seeks the fairy tale. Around her, she sees Henry Miller as the celebrity after publication of his books, and she hears Gonzolo rant that neurosis is for the rich, a luxury; the poor are more concerned with putting bread on the table. A rehearsal for war takes place with airplanes simulating air attacks. Anais soaks it all in, is touched by everything around her. She feels happy but realizes it takes many things to make her happy, including the love of three different men.

What does it take to make me happy? Waking up naturally. Morning coffee. A long soak in a tub with bath salts. Walking outside in beautiful weather. Having someone to share experiences with and discuss life with. Solitude. Delicious food and drink. Getting enough sleep.What is happiness to you?