The Wisdom of Anais NinEvent date: August 1, 2010 While preparing my thoughts last week on Fog and Sun, I came across a wonderful quote: 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. - Anais Nin I loved the poetry of the words combined with the joy over the ordinary things in life. I went looking for other Nin quotes and found that she had something to say about many diverse aspects of life and spirituality. All this from a woman known for her erotica. This week I’ll share some of Nin’s words and ideas, along with my own thoughts of how her wisdom can make our lives more joyous. Take a look at some of Anais Nin’s thought provoking quotes (below). Feel free to leave your own ideas or comments. (You don’t have to enter your email, everyone’s ideas are welcome!) Join us this Sunday at 11:00 for 60 minutes of lively (and live) music from the Joyful Harmony Band, my reflections, a chance for discussion and some quiet meditative time. Enjoy refreshments at noon, and then, if you like, stay for The Harmony Wisdom Circle. “There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.” Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. “I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ”idea of them.” “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.” And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. Dreams are necessary to life. Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it. Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. Good things happen to those who hustle. How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself. I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern. 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. 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 naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. 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. It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all. Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. 1 – 2 – 3 Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish it’s source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living. Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. People living deeply have no fear of death. 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 human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless. The only abnormality is the incapacity to love. The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery. The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. 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. There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country. Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning. We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship? When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. “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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” “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.” “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?” “I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ” “I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.” “From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.” “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. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.” “Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.” “I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.” “Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.” “”Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.” “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” “Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying ‘You gave me the wrong key!” “You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.” “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.” “Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the 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. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is 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 taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing 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 man rests inside of her” “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.” “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.” “Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same direction” “Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I’m just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it really hard to set my ways and say, “Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?” Anaïs Nin: One word I would banish from the dictionary is ‘escape.’ Just banish that and you’ll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also you’re in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything…. We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one’s sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it’s what we want to do. You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.” “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” “We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.” “What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.” “I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.” “Dreams are necessary to life.” “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.” “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.” “if what proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then i will never know happiness. for i am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.” |
Sunday Celebration 11:00am
Oakland Veterans Hall
200 Grand Avenue at Harrison
(510) 451-3009
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