Anais Nin moves from the sleepy town of Sierre Madre to Hollywood in the Summer of 1956. It is actually Silver Lake where she lives and will live for the rest of her life, in addition to maintaining a residence in New York with her husband. She lives in this Los Angeles district with Rupert Pole who left his job with the forestry service to teach junior high. She has been married to both men since March of 1955.
She meets new people, one whom she describes as transforming "this world into one livable for her, how she could create something out of it." It sounds as though Anais has found another person who believes in the power of the artist.
She reads new books, among them Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, which describes how "people use political ideas to hurt and fight each other, that it is not a dedication to the hungry or the poor, but to an ideology which would make each man the enemy of the one who does not think as he does." It sounds like politics today.
Anais also reads an autobiography called Tiger of the Snows about climbing Mount Everest. Some argue that such ventures are taken on simply to satisfy one's ego. Others say is provides a good example of courage and endurance. Anais writes, "I read it as a metaphor. It seemed to me that all of us are trying to climb Mount Everest. That we do risk wounds, falls, precipices, frozen feet and hands, snow burn, snow blindness." What is your Mount Everest?
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