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.