August, 1954: Loss of a Mother

Anais Nin's mother dies. The pain of irrevocable loss. The torment of regrets and guilt. The feeling that part of you has died with them.

You never know that when you see someone, it could be for the last time.

Did you love them enough? Will you still feel their disapproval of your life, independent from theirs, your life of freedom? Why weren't you able to get closer to them? What images of them will you preserve?

Summer, 1954: Earthquakes of the Soul

Anais Nin reflects on friendships and relationships in this entry of her Diary:

"Mourning days for failed friendships are over. I am not victimized by neglect, less prone to earthquakes of the soul, to tidal waves of anguish. Quarrels at one time were prophetic of separation, loss (since the largest quarrel of all led to the separation of my parents and the loss of the father, country, a musical world). Jealousy was once a messenger of divorce (my mother's jealousy of my father). Today I can live for months without the strangulation of anxiety, I have occasional minor attacks of nervousness, or panic; no nightmares, less guilt for living my own life according to my own nature. Very little of that excruciating fatigue which tightens my neck like a vice until I do not rest, nor eat or sleep well."

May, 1954: Psychological Deep Sea Diving

As soon as Anais Nin returns to New York from her vacation in Acapulco, the peace and tranquility she felt are erased. She is reminded of her need to be a writer and her failure to be accepted as a serious writer. She rereads her own work and is still proud of it and still has faith in it; she cannot understand why others don't get it.

In a letter to Maxwell Geismar, she elaborates on the purpose of her work: "I am continuing the work of Freud, which I believe more valuable than the work of Marx." Freud knew the source of evil and war and was attacking it at its inception, she believes. "Our failures (wars, racial prejudice, greed, corruption) prove the error of Marxism," she says. "I want to change human beings at the source. That means psychological deep-sea diving," she continues.

Spring, 1954: Life and Death

Anais Nin loves Acapulco and spends another 20 days there vacationing. Life there is like a dream where her body and spirit are at peace. Fiestas abound. People dress in vibrant colors. She spends days at the beach, swimming and suntanning, and evenings, dancing at night clubs. She feels the "Latins and Negroes are right. Happiness is in the physical life, and sorrow is in thought. At least I can say I have possessed all physical life. But I wish I could devote myself to it, live only for it." Acapulco is the home of beauty and feeling to Anais.

Back in Los Angeles, Anais says, "Sometimes when I think of death, I think merely that it would be too bad, but I have not yielded up all the treasures I have collected. The chemistry I am producing of turning experiences into awareness is not yet finished." She is only 51 years old and already thinking about the end. It seems as though age 50 is a turning point for many people on this topic.

February, 1954: Why Does One Write?

Anais records her response to a question about why she writes in this entry of her Diary:

"Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me: the world of my parents, the world of Henry Miller, the world of Gonzalo, or the world of wars. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and re-create myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others."

She continues, "We also write to heighten our own awareness of life; we write to lure and enchant and console others; we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth; we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don't write I feel my world shrinking. I feel am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing."

Winter, 1953 - 1954: Fire

Anais Nin looks out the window and sees the mountains behind the house in Sierra Madre on fire. Horses are lead out, and old people from isolated cabins are rescued. She makes coffee and provides blankets to evacuees and rescuers. Her main concern is packing the diaries for evacuation.

Besides making sure people and pets are safely out, what would you pack for evacuation from a fire? Of course, it depends on how much time you have. Forest fires in the western U.S. come with more advance notice than a fire in your home or apartment. Even so, what is most important to you? What would you save?

December, 1953: Movie Star

Kenneth Anger makes a film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, in an apartment, and Anais Nin plays the part of Astarte. He was inspired after attending a Halloween party called "Come as Your Madness" dreamed up by Paul Mathiesen and Renate Druks, which was also attended by Curtis Harrington, Samson de Brier, and Katy Kadell. It is a 38-minute film that brings historical, biblical, and mythical figures together.

Fall, 1953: Notes on Living

Here is what is going on in Anais Nin's life in the fall of 1953:

- Under a Glass Bell is on the Columbia University reading list. The Four-Chambered Heart is sold to a Swedish publisher.

- How can we get inside another's mind? It takes honesty on their part. What about reading their diary, if they are truthful, and if they allow it?

- There is value to individual development - it contributes to awareness in society as a whole.

- Horrors of aging - deafness, false teeth, restrictions of all kinds.

- Mother's human qualities - generosity, devotion, sacrifice.

- Father's qualities - artist who re-created human condition, transformed reality.

 - Human condition - domestic life, chores, nursing the sick, marketing, mothering others, cleaning house.

- If you contemplate future travels and dazzling friendships, it can make the human condition more beautiful by diverting it towards a beautiful aim.

Summer, 1953: Random Thoughts

A few key thoughts Anais Nin reveals in this entry of her Diary:

- clutter interferes with freedom of thought

- "the most tragic moment in human relationships is when we are given to see, accidentally, by a revealing word, or a moment of crisis, the image which the other carries within himself of us, and we catch a glimpse of a stranger, or a caricature of ourselves, or an aspect of our worst self aggrandized, larger than nature, or a total distortion."

- some escapes are constructive

- you can disagree with someone but still like and respect them

- the artist is a type of adventurer, going through hells most people are not willing to explore

- often times, your conflicts are not with others but within yourself

Spring, 1953: Passion

Moments of passion are the highest moments in life, Anais Nin says. All of her best moments are born of passion, she says, and the other moments, she does not dwell on. Passion is a way of life that creates awareness, aliveness, an absence of automatically plodding through a routine.

Anais goes further in discussing the role of awareness in psychoanalysis. She says that awareness alone does not make a person change behavior; it takes analysis to re-live and confront situations and feelings and find the original wound. This process enables a change from within; a heightened awareness leads to realizations of aspirations.

Anais has recovered from the surgery to remove her ovary, and rewards herself with another trip to Mexico.

February, 1953: Tumor

Just a few weeks before her 50th birthday, a tumor the size of an orange found on Anais Nin's right ovary is removed during an operation. To make this experience more palatable, Anais wears her red wool burnoose as she is wheeled to the X-Ray room.

She has recently paid for the printing of A Spy in the House of Love herself, having not found a publisher to back her. She continues to be aware of her "failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies and completely neglected."

This causes her psychic pain in addition to the physical pain she has felt related to the tumor in her ovary. Writing helps her transcend the pain and brings her into a self-created world which is not only tolerable, but often, beautiful.

Winter, 1952 - 1953: Loyal Love

Anais Nin recognizes her mother as being a "fixed, stable point of loyal love." It seems as though she is referring to unconditional love. How many people can you count as having unconditional, loyal love for you? If you are like me, probably just one - your mother. There may be one other one who comes close, who sees your dark side and remains by your side. These people deserve a huge display of appreciation for our gratitude for their deep love of us.

Fall, 1952: Ostracized

Anais Nin feels ostracized by the American literary community, left out of anthologies, poetry readings, and magazines. And yet, she does not sacrifice or surrender her values. She has an ideal for which she has fought, dreamed, envisioned. She is searching for happiness and fulfillment through her writing. Her happiness comes from the achievement of her values and her wisdom, brought to life in her novels. Her work is the purpose of her life. Her joy cannot come by compromising her values. She is dedicated to her principles. The fire inside her does not go out. So let them ostracize her; she will endure.

Summer, 1952: A Spy in the House of Love

Anais Nin decides to rewrite A Spy in the House of Love, making the "lie detector," which is supposed to represent the personification of the conscience, more clear. As with all of her novels, she draws from characters in her diaries, (thinly) disguises them, and turns them into fictional characters, seemingly unable to create from scratch out of her imagination.

A Spy in the House of Love is about an unfulfilled woman who seeks relationships with a string of men. It is about Anais and her inner reality and struggle to find an ideal relationship. There is some feeling of guilt, but it is overpowered by the need to find personal fulfillment and satisfaction. Does she want to be free, or does she want to be caught? Does she want to be judged, or does she want to be accepted?

Spring, 1952: Restlessness

Anais Nin writes a letter and includes a quotation from an unknown source: "The adventurer is within us, and he contests for our favor with the social man we are obliged to be. Those two sorts of life are incompatible; one we hanker for, the other we are obliged to."

We  want to be free, and yet we get married and have children have responsibilities to our families and work in conventional jobs and are involved in the community, each of which comes with a "cage" of sorts. This creates conflict and restlessness within us. If we live our lives with no regard to others, we are called "selfish." When we consider others as we live our lives, we may feel resentful and controlled. What is the answer?

Balance the life of the adventurer with the life of the social being at a level that makes you comfortable. The feeling of restlessness will never go away completely or forever, but you can keep it at bay and feel happy and contented most of the time. And don't keep a "Ledger of Guilts" as Anais did. Any thoughts?

Winter, 1951 - 1952: Rejection

Anais Nin is trying to get A Spy in the House of Love, the fourth novel in the continuous novel called Cities of the Interior, published. She is angry yet tries to remain positive, though she feels isolated, rejected. She is omitted from anthologies, and her manuscripts are returned by magazines. Publishers either don't like her work or don't understand her work, especially the "lie detector" in Spy.

She describes what it takes for her to write: "No one else can do what I have done, I know that, because it took a spiritual vision allied to sensuality to clothe in flesh such deep meanings, and it took a life in hell and many lives of painful explorations, and it took even a dangerous sojourn in the world of madness and the capacity to return to tell what I have told."

Anais includes in this entry her idea for a project for which she applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first half which has already been accomplished by the three novels she has already written (Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, and The Four Chambered Heart). The second half of the project is to be three more novels which will cover "a philosophic demonstration of the understanding and mastering of the neurosis." In this project, she will prove "the relationship between the state of the world and the inner psychological conflicts." The project was rejected.

Fall, 1951: Detox in Acapulco

Anais Nin heads to Acapulco, her favorite vacation destination, once again, to experience another healing process. She says, "to me, Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has something to do with the presence of millions of anonymous faces, anonymous people, and the desperate ways of achieving distinction."

Of course, one of her hang ups is that she has not achieved distinction; she has not been noticed; she has not risen above the crowd in the literary world. She is frustrated and goes to Acapulco to just forget about it.

What are your favorite destinations, and what draws you there? I enjoy Santa Fe for the art and beauty, and I love New York for the energy and excitement.

July, 1951: Film vs. Literature

Anais Nin does enjoy taking in the occasional film, but in this entry of her Diary, she says, "I find a danger in watching films. It is like passive dreaming. It requires no participation, no effort. It induces passivity. It is baby food; no need to masticate, no need to carve. There is no need to learn to play an instrument, to learn to read a book. People stretch on specially inclined chairs and receive the images in utter, infantile passivity."

I have a similar wish when either watching a film or reading a book - that it moves me emotionally, whether it inspires me, makes me mad, makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me think, or teaches me something. I feel that when a film or book does this for me, it has achieved what I wanted it to achieve. I view film and literature as equal, although a book tends to take longer to read than a film to watch.

Which does more for you - film or literature?

June, 1951: Economic Independence

Anais Nin turns again to psychoanalysis when she feels "fruitless anger" from frustration about the difficulties in publishing her work sapping her energy, doing her harm, corroding her. She doesn't feel she can publish her own books as she did in past because of the time it takes away from her writing.

Anais feels that life in Sierra Madre is dull, and life in New York is too full of activity, and there must be a third way she could live. She realizes she is dependent upon her husband for money, and this makes her feel helpless. She wants to achieve economic independence so that she can live her own life, but America does not seem to want to accept her work, which makes her bitter.

She visits Dr. Inge Bogner, a female psychoanalyst she can be more honest with because she is not trying to charm or seduce, to let off steam. She feels some peace and serenity and courage after these talks.

Spring, 1951: Sierre Madre

Anais Nin is 48 years old. She takes another trip to Mexico and experiences shabby hotel rooms where one had a water closet inside the shower and another had a chamber pot under the bed.

The doctor advises Anais to find a warmer and drier climate than San Francisco, so she settles in Sierre Madre, a mountain village one hour from Los Angeles. She finds it sunny, dry, and beautiful, and of course, Rupert Pole is stationed there with the Forestry Service.

Winter, 1950 - 1951: Living Outside the Diary

"I wanted to live on the outside, to see how it was to stay outside and never re-enter the cave of the interior life. I stayed outside, in cars, in buses, in planes, and never stopped to write in the diary. I did work on the novels," Anais says in this entry of her Diary.

Certainly, she is writing much less in the Diary these last three years than ever before. She has learned to drive, she tried skiing, she's had several trips to Mexico and several flights back and forth between Los Angeles (via San Francisco where her mother and brother live) and New York, she's had several bookshop parties to attend and shows to see (Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo).

Has the lack of analyzing and interpreting her life by reflecting on it in the Diary been good for her? Is she happier now? Or is her life so full of activity that she has no time or energy to reflect on it?

Summer, 1950: Coast to Coast

Anais Nin flies from New York to California, a 12-hour trip in those days, to live her double life with her husband Hugo in New York and her lover Rupert in California. It is no wonder she does not write nearly as much in her Diary as she has in the past - she is exhausted. The writing she does have time and energy for is letter writing. She appears to be in survival mode.

She nurtures herself by swimming in the pool. She relaxes herself with the occasional trip to Mexico. She comforts herself by letter writing and reading. She hasn't learned to say no. She doesn't seem to want to simplify her life.

Winter, 1949 - 1950: Writers and Artists

In New York, Anais Nin goes from bookshop party to bookshop party, signing copies of The Four-Chambered Heart. She gives six lectures. And, she finishes A Spy in the House of Love. No wonder she isn't writing in her Diary as much as she used to.

Anais includes the following ideas in her notes for lectures:

"Our senses tend to be dulled by familiarity, tend to become mechanical and automatic. What the artist or writer seeks to do by exaggeration, or distortion, is not only to make us notice a difference but to reveal a new aspect," she writes. "This is the rule of the artist, to seek to renew and resharpen our senses by a a new vision of the familiar," she continues.

Anais speaks to people in conventional jobs and lives: "Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up the work he does not like, disciplines himself, sacrifices some fantasy he had once, to travel or to paint, or even possibly to write, may feel toward the artist and writer a jealousy of his adventurous life. The artist and the writer have generally paid the full price for their independence and for the privilege of doing work they love, or for their artistic rebellions against standardized living or values," she writes.

Conventionality is boring to some people as it suffocates us, kills our spirit, buries our creativity. Other personalities need the security of conventionality to prevent anxiety in their lives. Are you conventional or non-conventional? Which do you want to be?

October 20, 1949: Her Father Dies

"My father died this morning, in Cuba. The hurt was so deep, the shock so deep, the sense of loss so deep, it was as if I had died with him. I felt myself breaking, falling. I wept not to have seen him since Paris, not to have forgiven him, not to have been there when he died alone and poor in a hospital," Anais opens this entry in her Diary.

Loss, unfulfilled love, death of a part of herself, disbelief, pain are felt by Anais even though she viewed her father as selfish and disconnected from other human beings. She cannot accept it because the relationship was unresolved.

This is a sad situation when someone you love and care about dies unexpectedly, without warning, before you had a chance to make peace or say your goodbyes. This is why you must not waste time or hold grudges or procrastinate because you never know when an interaction with a person will be your last opportunity.