Incest: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1932-1934)

by Anaïs Nin

At the same time, I want to write just as a drunk wants to drink.

Everything is twinkling inside of me, as if someone were pressing his fingers on my closed eyelids.

The serenity of knowing what is supremely and divinely right. The world is at last focused. This is the center.

And strange—the center can only be a fulfilled circle, of course, which I never knew before because I was only a crescent moon, a curved half circle,

curved in gaping, dolorous craving, bowed around emptiness, arms surrounding to meet nothing, a line unfinished, a life unrounded, a curve unfilled, suspended over the world, pale with unfullness, and now shining round, rounded, comp...

The basest things are sometimes inspired by the good.

One evening Fred came, and Henry and I had been living so intensely together we didn’t know how to talk to Fred.

And because I am one of those “historical romantics” conscious of destiny, of the past, the past is more potent, and I cannot move, I cannot destroy, even if it means destroying one human being for the sake of two artists!

I hate lies, double lives, continuous insincerity, shifting, transition, deceits. I want wholeness, wholeness with Henry! I need absolutism.

I hate this wise intellectual floating over life, this balancing, this keeping up of many lives and loves, this living on three or four levels.

He holds me by my sense of guilt, of responsibility, my incapacity to inflict pain.

Why didn’t he take me in his arms when I was under his spell and let wisdom go to hell, have me, know me, even if it all leads to tragedy?

Children. What are children? Abdication before life. Here, little one, I transmit a life to you of which I have made a superb failure.