Dusting off Anais Nin

Total lack of creativity tonight. I've been hammering away at Chapter Seven, but I feel less like a wordsmith, and more like a plumber. A plumber of punctuation.

So I put down my wrench and (as I've done frequent times before) I went digging for inspiration in the many volumes of my library. Tonight, I pulled out a tome of Anais Nin's diary, opened a random page and... here's the semi-random quote I fell upon:

Without self-knowledge you are not capable of objectivity. Only of rationalization. When you have self-knowledge you know what areas of your judgement are not to be trusted.

Very wise. I expected nothing less of my old friend Anais. But then I pulled out another tome... and another... and had one of those crashing revelations that are inevitable, but surprising nonetheless.

I've outgrown Anais Nin. It's official.

I was approaching 20 years of age when I read the first pages of her diary, and it was an epiphany. Here was a true artist. A richly creative woman who lived fearlessly, passionately. I underlined so many passages, left breathless by the desire to be her. When I read of her death, this woman who spent her life questioning the birth and death of creativity, who spent her days seeking sexual pleasure, who had an incestuous relationship with her father, I was rocked by the irony of her dying from a cancer deep inside her uterus.

Every moment of her life seemed charged with meaning and feeling, and I coveted her ability to give herself so willingly to life. Not the father stuff, obviously, but the other cooler non-incesty parts.

And then...

Having spent 30 minutes tonight rereading the underlined passages, I am a little saddened to announce that I've lost my idealism of Anais Nin. I respect her creativity, I love her spirit, but I see her as a real woman now, possessing frailties and weaknesses, and deep psychological flaws. She was never the perfect, mystic creature that I imagined.

And that's a good thing.

Because it means that I've finally achieved the maturity necessary (as an artist and as a woman) to understand Nin - and other artists, other women - on a level previously not accessible to me.

Cooool.