The Virgin Spring

Anain Nin Revisited

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me nave or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

I write emotional algebra.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.

To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

I am in a beautiful prison from which I can only escape by writing.

My diary is a mirror telling the story of a dreamer who, a long long time ago went through life the way one reads a book.

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-bearing and man-bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment the man rests inside of her.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

I have the right to love many people at once and to change my prince often.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that a real friendship?

Dreams have helped me to live.

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensible as poetry.

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

There are many ways to be free.

One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

For Anaïs
d. January 14, 1977 at
midnight

1.
in the obscurity of the room
illumination: you and phosphorescent death
fusing

your voice
usurped by the wizard

our hands meeting
eloquent final

your embrace took me with you
a moment into the source of dream
where you were returning

phosphor / ash to gold
raying upward
from the Sea

2.
wound-up bone
prepares to explode

a coiled-in moment
prepares for sunburst

a fluttering
you awake into radiance

3.
You die
but you advance
as wings of light
move in the expanse
of sky

Unique as compassion.
in the air we breathe
we meet the light
you begin to shed
toward us

We had not dreamed that gone
you would be accessible
in the place
of intangible light
as new dimension

For crossing
you had to become bone/
cross: And that flame bore you beyond
the gravity of ground: joined
you to the light.

Daisy Aldan