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?
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