Post
by SadLuckDame » October 3rd, 2009, 8:50 pm
The Diary of Anais Nin
Volume One
My joy and energy overflowed. I love living, moving. I began to ordain my kingdom. I swam through a Sargasso Sea of mail; the telephone rang, Allendy, Artaud, Henry, Joaquin. Work. Engagements. Letters. To give each one the illusion of being the chosen one, the favorite, the only one. If all my letters were put together they would reveal startling contradictions. Because I imagine people need those lies as much as I need them. Truth is coarse and unfruitful. I tell Allendy I have just arrived as if he were the first one I called.
My father tells me benign lies such as: "This is the first time I have wanted a lot of money," (to make me gifts) when I know he has always needed a lot of money, that he loves luxury, American cars, silk shirts, gold-tipped cigarettes, and lavish bouquets for his mistresses. I smile. All incense I gave others is blown back to me, under my nose. All my own tricks and lies and deceptions are offered to me out of my father's magician's box. The same box I use for my illusionist practice.
While he is writing me, Delia, or some other woman, is lying two feet away; her perfume can reach me; and he may be saying to her: "I must write to my daughter that she is now the only woman in my life, for that is a proper romantic end to an aging Don Juan's life: he must surrender all and become his daughter's chevalier servant." The treachery of illusion. Creating illusion and delusion. Improving on reality. Who is going to wring the truth from the other? Who lied first? Once when my father was reading me aloud a letter from Maruca, he read me a whole paragraph of affectionate greetings to me from her. Then he left the letter on the table and when I reread it, there were no such messages, just a conventional: :Give my love to Anais."
...
This diary proves a tremendous, all engulfing craving for truth since, to write it, I risk destroying the whole ediface of my illusions, all the gifts I made, all that I created and protected, everyone whom I saved from truth.
What does the world need, the illusion I gave in life, or the truth I give in writing? When I went about dreaming of satisfying people's dreams, satisfying their hunger for illusion, didn't I know that this was the most painful and the most insatiable hunger? What impels me to offer now, truth in place of illusion?