November, 1945: Facing Fear

Anais is invited to speak in public, giving a short lecture, and reading a passage from This Hunger. It is her fear, speaking in public. She wears her favorite outfit. She stands, rather than sits, to give her performance.

In her Diary,  she analyzes the ordeal and the mastery of shyness. "As children, we are made to feel we will only be loved if we are good (in the parent's terms). As soon as we begin to affirm our real selves, parents begin to reject us. We grow up with the idea that if we are ourselves we will be rejected. So, as artists, in our work we express our real self. But we keep the fear of not being loved for this real self. And timidity and shyness are the symptoms. A timidity we can overcome with those who understand and accept us. Now when I have to face the world with my real self exposed in the writing, there is a crisis. Am I going to be accepted, approved, loved, or punished and rejected? Hence the fear. Last night I took this chance and won," she says.

October, 1945: World of the Artist

Anais Nin describes the world of the artist as being one of joy, creation, freedom, and altruism. She contrasts this with the world of reality, one of greed, power, war, self-interest, corruption, dullness, and hypocrisy.

She encounters people who come from both worlds; she seeks the world of the artist and avoids the world of reality. Artists haven't forgotten how to dream and maintain the innocence of the child. They understand the abstraction in her writing because they are poets. They seek harmony, as she does, and have no need to argue to prove they are right. Artists are romantic, intuitive, spontaneous people who create beauty.

September, 1945: Joyless People

How and when does one become a heavy, joyless, one-dimensional, cynical, bitter person?

Anais complains about people, men in her day, who are focused only on politics, work, money, greed, and power. She spends time with adolescent men and realizes that some day, they will become like their fathers. Now they are carefree, living in the world of music and art, pleasure and adventure-seeking, but soon, the reality of the real world will catch up to them and weigh them down.

She is attracted to the youth's positive attitudes towards life, their hope and optimism and dreams. Anais is 42 years old now and has not lost sight of her dreams whereas others her age dismissed them years ago. I think that is the difference between joyful people and joyless people: whether or not they still have dreams.

August, 1945: Examine the Present

"Rank did not believe in going back. He felt the same drama would manifest itself in the present; all one needed to do was examine the present. So in the present I was experiencing a conflict between the openness of the young, their curiosity, exploration, receptivity, playfulness, nimbleness, as against the heavy, opaque, solid, immovable mass of maturity I meet at parties," Anais declares.

Japan surrenders, and Anais relates war in the world to hostility in the individual. "We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing agression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there." she says.

July, 1945: Intuition or Analysis?

Which should we live by, rely on, intuition or analysis? Anais Nin says, "But I see clearly now, that both are necessary: to live passionately and blindly, to take risks; and then to interpret later, in order to rescue one's self from disaster if it turns out to be an illusion rather than a creative intuition."

She goes further to say, "There is an analogy between the bombardment of the atom and the bombardment of the personality by the method of analysis, the dismemberment, separation of the elements of the psyche which may release new energies. I believe scientific principles can be applied to the life of the psyche."

June, 1945: Spiritual Quest

"What I leave out of my work I leave out, discard, and overlook in life as well, because I do not think it is important. It weighs people down, and kills vision and spiritual perceptions. Too much upholstery. We are limited enough as it is without weighing ourselves down with facts which do not inspire, nourish, or liberate us," Anais says. "Everything else to me are obstacles, interferences, clutterings, inessentials," she continues.

Her friends says Anais is driven by a spiritual quest. She is aroused by life, always looking for meaning, and leaving out the superfluous. She constantly tries to make sense of her experiences by asking herself, what does this mean?

May, 1945: "The Double"

Anais Nin recalls a discussion she had with Dr. Otto Rank about what he termed "the double:" our need to project a part of ourselves onto others. Another doctor spoke about the same concept and how we play a persona to the world. Anais took notes:

"The acceptance of this social role delivers us to the demands of the collective, and makes us a stranger to our own reality. The consequent split in the personality may find the ego in agreement with general community expectations, while the repressed shadow turns dissenter. Failure to acknowledge this dark alter ego creates the tendency to project it onto someone in the immediate environment, the mirror-opposite to one's self. This redeems the masked self from total annihilation."

The doctor went on about the need to accept the shadow in human relationships. It is a wonderful thing when someone sees everything about you, your light parts and your dark parts, and accepts it all. It is an even more wonderful thing to accept the dark side of ourselves. Acknowledgement and acceptance of the shadow results in being conscious of the whole personality.

April, 1945: Portrait of her brother Joaquin

Anais spends a lot of time in this entry speaking of her brother Joaquin and his music. She says, "It was he as a musician who accomplished what I dreamed of, and I followed as well as I could with the inferior power of words. The ear is purer than the eye, which reads only relative meaning into words. Whereas the distillation of experience into pure sound, a state of music, is timeless and absolute."

Anais admires her brother's character and says, "He drew his strength from his love, never from hatred, and later is was his capacity for love, understanding, and forgiveness which kept the family from estrangements. He was always trying to reunite and reconstruct the family unit. He never took sides, judged, or turned a hostile back on anyone."

March, 1945: Boy Friends

Anais spends this entry of her Diary with her young boy friends, "Pablo," an Irish boy she met at a Village coffeehouse, and Leonard W., who conducts hypnosis sessions with some of her other friends. Leonard goes to war a a few weeks. So, for a while, his "real life," "the dream," begins as he hangs out with Anais and her friends, discussing books, listening to music, talking about various topics.

Anais is attracted to the young, with their curiosities and willingness to try new things. Older people fall into patterns and set ways, and they feel rigid and tight to her. Even though she is now 42 years old, Anais sees herself as young and wants to stay that way.

January, 1945: The Sameness of People

Anais Nin is writing portraits of characters for her novel, and she tends to draw from people in her Diary. Her shortcoming is that she doesn't know what goes on inside their minds, so the women start to lose their separate traits and merge into one another. In fact, they become intermingled with Anais herself. She begins to feel that at a subconscious level, people are all the same - they all have emotions and dreams and instincts. She prefers to write from this level as she feels she is not writing intellectually, not writing with her mind.

December, 1944: Liberation

"Touched bottom again. Decided to liberate myself," Anais Nin begins this entry. "We are never trapped unless we choose to be," she continues.

You can provide yourself with the experiences you seek. You are the sum total of your choices and can be or do anything you choose. If you discover your deepest needs and satisfy them, you can be happy. If you're in a rut, change something. What you dreamt about as a girl can still become reality; it's not too late. You can decide how you want your life to be, to look. Go out there and do it - there is no substitute for action!

October, 1944: Turning the Diary into a Novel

Anais Nin attempts and struggles off and on to take what she has written in her Diary and create portraits of people to use in novels. Her biggest struggle is putting words into their mouths because she knows only what she feels, what she would say in a given situation. The novel she is currently working on is This Hunger.

She says, "trying to extract complete characters from the maze of the diary. Trying to construct a story. But a novel is the opposite of life. Discovery that characters are revealed in fragments, not all at once; and during our lifetime we rarely make a synthesis. I cannot work in the artificial form of the novel. I have to follow free associations from another source, to trace character not in the outward manifestations but in its underground life, in the development of its night life."

September, 1944: Physical as Symbol of Spiritual

Anais begins this Diary entry with: "The physical as a symbol of the spiritual world. The people who keep old rags, old useless objects, who hoard, accumulate: are they also keepers and hoarders of old ideas, useless information, lovers of the past only, even in its form of detritus?"

She continues: "I have the opposite obsession. In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use. I keep nothing to remind me of the passage of time, deterioration, loss, shriveling."

I suppose the same can be said of people in your life. You tend to find people you are meant to be with at a certain point in your life, and purpose is served, after which, both parties may move on. There's nothing wrong with that. If you force yourself to stay in friendships you've outgrown, you may feel trapped and unhappy.

August, 1944: Exchanging Treasures

"You cannot learn, love, or create by stealing. You have to create yourself first, and your work, and then bonds are born of this, genuine ones, and people exchange their treasures. You can't force things," Anais explains to a friend.

Building intimacy, making a meaningful connection with another human being works like this. You have to be willing to go deeper, to be intimate, to be vulnerable and share some truth about yourself with another. After you have opened up, the other person will be more willing to open up, and the exchange of treasures is enabled.

All of us have inside ourselves a multitude of hidden treasures - hopes, dreams, wishes, desires - that we long to share with others. Do you have someone with whom you can exchange your buried treasures?

July, 1944: Sea & Sun

Ahhh... a four-day weekend retreat to Moira's home in Amagansett with friends - eating, drinking, laughing, talking, resting, and relaxing in the warm sun by the sea. Anais loves the water; it calms her and also gives her energy and restores her. She and her friends can forget about the war for a few days and be appreciative of their friendships.

June, 1944: Hope

Anais Nin has started a new book, This Hunger, whose main character is inspired in part by Luise Rainer. This is a good time for Anais as she feels she is expanding, blossoming, always recreating herself, and unblocking not only herself but also others. She feels the affects of the war and is concerned that it kills emotions and destroys feelings in others, although in her stage of emotional maturity, she is able to maintain a larger perspective. For those who have no inner life to sustain themselves or process events, it becomes difficult to maintain hope.

May, 1944: The Inner Life

Anais Nin values the inner life, a place she says is like a photographer's darkroom, like a laboratory, but she says you can't stay there too long or you become solitary, neurotic. Her Diary gives her the opportunity to relive moments, to conserve memories, to record and interpret her life, but she is balanced by passionate living and intense activity. And that is the key - balancing the inner life with the outer life.

April, 1944: Development of the Individual

Anais Nin believes the development of the individual has a more natural, organic influence on history than the development of systems (e.g. political). She believes systems fail because the individuals involved are incomplete as human beings because they do not work on self development; they are corrupt and imperfect. If people develop and grow, systems will not be needed because people will be able to rule themselves, she believes. Anais encourages us to create ourselves as individuals.

April, 1944: Anais has Arrived

With the publication of Under a Glass Bell, Anais Nin makes connections, is reviewed and photographed, receives telephone calls and letters, attends parties, becomes established as a serious writer, and finally stops feeling restless, and instead, feels happiness. Success, activity, hopeful to pay off debts, confidence is hers.