Fall, 1970: Paris in the Fall

Anais Nin is in Paris again for a television show appearance. She rehearses for the show, visits relatives, and listens to a classical music concert playing in the Tuileries.

She has many readers now that the diaries are published and spends much time responding to their letters. She tells them how she has created her own world and decided who to let in, discarding who and what did not belong to her image of the outer world of which she dreamed, shutting out TV and the media who deal so much with sides of human nature she doesn't want to let into her world.

Summer, 1970: Return to Paris

Anais Nin returns to Paris for the publication of the second volume of her Diary. She dines at the Coupole, Closerie des Lilas and Café du Dome. She visits her home in Louveciennes and finds it run down and neglected. She visits Villa Seurat and Place Clichy where Henry Miller once had a studio and an apartment. She walks through the Bois and along the Seine.

She plans to return to Paris on September 3, 1970 for television appearances.

Spring, 1970: Masculine & Feminine Traits

Anais Nin believes that all of us possess both masculine and feminine traits, and she would like to see us stop using those terms and just try to find balance and a way to live together. She says we all have days of courage and days of weakness and that we need interdependence. We can find liberation by loving each other and working together and joining forces and being true to who we are. Psychoanalysis, she says, is the only way to know who we are.

Winter, 1969 - 1970: Tumor

Anais Nin finds out she has a tumor in her uterus, and her alternatives are radiation, which has a 75% chance of healing, or surgery, which would leave her with two open holes in her body. She opts for the radiation and runs pleasant scenes and images through her mind during the six-minute duration of it, every day for three weeks. She is weakened by it and receives few visitors. She wonders, "Why now, when all my wishes are fulfilled?"

Fall, 1969: The Joys of Reading

We all love reading to expand our worlds, be entertained, learn, be inspired, be intrigued. Anais Nin writes a nice tribute to reading in this diary entry:

"The reading of books is in itself the most beautiful education of all. Because of reading I became acquainted with the entire world, physical, intellectual, historical, scientific. My life was expanded. The knowledge of what existed in the world, in other countries, of the possibilities and potentialities of life, prepared me for experience, for the unknown, for unfamiliar situations. Only by reading does one possess such a power to travel, to visit all the lands, to make friends with characters of all periods, so that one learns to observe the riches of the present and the possible loves and friendships around us. Through books, I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys and sorrows, I acquired one of the most precious sources of strength of all: an understanding of human beings, insight into their motivations, I also learned from books how to enhance what needed to be enhanced, by understanding, and by aesthetics. Books are the greatest companions, confessors, confidantes, tutors, a source of pleasure, a cure for loneliness, and to find one, in the middle of an island in Tahiti, in the heart of the Moroccan desert, or at an airport where one is stranded for a night, is to find the friend who reminds us we are not alone."

Some of my favorite books in addition to everything by Anais Nin, Hermann Hesse, and May Sarton include The Stranger by Albert Camus, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

What are your favorites?