Monday would have been Anaïs Nin’s 108th birthday. I remember reading her diaries as a teenager and yearning for transatlantic crossings, opium masquerades and rollicking affairs (just not with Henry Miller who, literary stature aside, I found rather trollish).
Mostly I remember being awestruck by her remarkable talent, insight and intense passion–for beauty, for creating and for living.
This passion is evident in much of her writing, but particularly so in this excerpt from her diary:
“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…”
Well put, Madame.