anais nin, a year of ordinary, diaries

'And on the jukebox is your, is your only song & I, I have never remembered the words.' - Martha Wainwright, When the Day is Short

I have been reading Anais Nin's Henry and June. My initial impression was undecided, I suppose. I had to remind myself that these extracts were written in diary format, that these are her thoughts, that self-absorption is the basis of a diary, not written or intended for anyone else except the diarist.

Now that I'm finished the book I have more of a sense of who she was and what she was searching for. The search for self, for actualisation, for meaning. The desire to feel and feel anything. In the last entry that was included in this book she writes:

'Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. ...  I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.'

I can't pretend to be able to take apart the book and analyse it for its literary impact, but I can see the advantage that Nin had of being first, being the first one to write about these things, being the first one with an openly bohemian lifestyle. Now, in 2008, if the same work were published it would be old, no longer fresh, boring.

Which brings me to my own diary. This diary. I thought it might metamorphose into something else but no, it's a record of my thoughts and actions from day to day. So it's a diary. There are some stories, some recipes, some other stuff, but it's a collection, a collecting place for everything I don't know where to put, including my thoughts.

I am almost tempted to make it private, but something stops me, I can't say what. The thrill of writing a diary lies perhaps in the surreptitious reader, the opening of the window into another life, the questions that each answered question raises in reply.

Anonymity is such a double edged sword. You think it protects you, but it's nebulous really.

Yesterday I went to read the scent of water and found a year of ordinary. 

Beautiful writing about life, less ordinary.