“i am but a silky fragment of a woman.”

Because I am feeling edgy and cynical … another lazy post of Anais Nin extracts that speak to me personally. One where I do none of the writing. Because if I write I’ll just be dark. Damn the traitorous organs to hell. I watch too much … I watch other people’s sighs and lusts and yearnings and love. And I wonder what illusions fill the world. “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” I want to be hard-hearted, contemptuous and yell “fuck that shit”. How many people have I shocked today with my melanchonic misanthropic mien? Where’s the grace you may ask? You also might say I am being scornful and sarcastic. And I might say that I am being realistic and rational. But I’m really just being bleak and forlorn. Never mind me. I’m sure my moods will change again as the breeze frivolously decides to change direction.

And there … I said I wouldn’t write. Sorry ’bout that.

“I feel that an initial shock has shattered my wholeness, that I am like a shattered mirror. Each piece has gone off and developed a life of its own. They have not died from the shock (as, in some cases I have seen, women who have died from betrayals, go into mourning, abdicate all love, never renew contact with man again), but separated into several selves, and each one developed a life of its own.
It is not fear that keeps me from gathering myself together and surrendering to one life. It is that there is an Anais who cannot bring all the pieces together, who can be devoted, love, and still feel alone and divided.”

“Enter this laboratory of the soul where every feeling will be x-rayed by Dr Allendy to expose the blocks, the twists, the deformations, the scars which interfere with the flow of life. Enter this laboratory of the soul where incidents are refracted into a diary, dissected to prove that everyone of us carries a deforming mirror where he sees himself too small or too large, too fat or too thin, even Henry, who believes himself so free, blithe, and unscarred. Enter here where one discovers that destiny can be directed, that one does not need to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. One need not be branded by the first pattern. Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy.”

Dr Allendy: “The more you act like yourself, the nearer you will come to fulfillment of your real needs.”
Anais: “But I am not sure what this self is. For the moment I seem to be busy tearing down what I was.”
Dr Allendy: “I do not despair of reconciling you to your own image.”
What a beautiful phrase! To reconcile me to my own image. And if he can help me to find this image?

“Is Henry right? He does not want me to write a diary any more. He thinks it is a malady, an outgrowth of loneliness. I don’t know. It has also become the notebook of my extroversion, a travel sketchbook: it is full of others. It has changed its aspect. I cannot abandon it, definitely. Henry says: “Lock up the journal, and swim. What I would like you to do is to live without the journal, you would write other things.”
“I would feel like a snail without its shell. Everyone has always stood in the way of the journal. My mother always urged me to go out and play. My brothers teased me, stole it, and made fun of it. It was a secret from my girl friends in school. Everyone said I would outgrow it. In Havana my aunt said it would spoil my eyes, frighten the boys away.”

“I am but a silky fragment of a woman.”