May 30, 2026
May 30, 2026
The words of Anais Nin have an enthralling impact on the reader. The moment her words appear before our eyes, something stirs within us. The power of candidness, honesty, and beauty enchant the reader. In a prosaic, dreary, and dull world, the words of Anais Nin hold immense power, and a promise of a better, more beautiful world. Her personal life was far from perfect but that is not the point here. She believed in her femininity, her flowing identity, and the undeniable pull of love. The focus at once turns within. We are made conscious of the vast universe within us. She captured the complexity of being a human perfectly. "We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relatives. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.’ [1]
With Anais Nin, identity is flowing; an ever-growing business. There is no rigid, compartmentalized SELF. It is flowing, expanding, contracting, moving like a river. ‘Life is a process of becoming a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.’ [2]
Conscious living is a bold choice. Anais makes this choice. She is a master of self-observation. She finds herself in a fluid state. Instead of ‘I am this’, she finds ‘ I am this and this and this…’ And from here comes her layered psyche. She fearlessly declares that she is all hues and colors. What impresses the reader is the power of living life authentically. In Nin’s world, there is no need to impress anyone. You are who you are. An individual has many moods, many needs, and many hopes. And all this keeps changing as well. To flow with the flow is the art of life. Of course, it can be debated that Nin is inconsistent and even a-moral at times. But morality, and preaching are not her forte. She makes no such claim. Her claim to fame comes from her deep psychological insights into the human soul. The Id and the dark side merge with the regular, conscious person. She refuses to put on the clock of a good girl for the world. We go to Nin for the purge, and not for gyan.
Reality is relative. The world is subjective. There are worlds within one person. The energy within one person, the force of conviction and the courage to act are matched by the universal force. This is exactly how her thought process goes. ‘We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.’ [3]
Further things are as we see them. ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’ [4]
This is radical self-creation; nothing less. We create ourselves as we go along the path of life. Every day, every moment, and in every situation, we choose a self. We create ourselves. That power of the individual is for the individual to exercise. Nin changed the literary scene with her bold assertion of the power of choice. She talked about taboo themes. She wrote about desire, raw desire and attraction. She delves deep into the anatomy of attraction. For her, pleasure is a path to self-discovery. It is the road to liberation. ‘Live what you dream’. A woman is not a secondary creature. The feminine force is awakened in the world of Anais Nin. Our secret life of longing is not just physical, she argues. It is the song of our soul. Imagination, curiosity and creativity are offshoots of desire. Life would be drudgery without love. Knowledge, action, and existence require heart. It is ‘felt’ action that changes the world. She refuses to be a commodity. We know of her public spats with critics who tried to label her as mere erotica. For her, navigating personal, inner strife through connection is important. Knowing someone is meaningless or rather it is demeaning without actually being attached, without caring or without the human touch. That is her line of thought. Anais Nin should be read as an author and also as a psychologist. She knows where the healing lies for the female soul.
Annis Nin was a master at journaling. "We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect." [5] She treats writing as the laboratory of the soul. Experiences and emotions are to be tasted again and again as juices of a fruit on tongue. The way a mango melts on tongue is just as words flow on the eye of the mind. Everyday experiences have depth if we pay heed. Journaling is self-therapy if we do it. Our raw emotions are processed. Complex situations and our relationship to ourselves get simplified in our pages. We have a connection with ourselves without guilt or judgement. This is important; to know that we are not perfect; where our heart is. Pain will become your personal power if you write it down. All trauma, heartache, and disappointment will be solved if we have the courage to name it; name it in words on a paper. Her diaries contain a massive 35000 pages, all unexpurgated. Nin emptied herself in this unfiltered genre. She lived life journaling it; literally.
There can be two ways of living life; one, treating every occurrence as magic or second, treating everything as mundane. Nin chose the former. She rejected conformity to ordinary life and wholeheartedly embraced the marvelous. Surrealism is an integral part of Nin’s writing. Surrealism manifests itself not in the traditional, rigid sense of the surrealist movement. Rather it comes in forms of inexplicable poetic appeal of Nin’s words. She explores the unconscious in a dreamlike, silken movement of poetic, imaginative, and evocative words. That is her magic. It is the surrealism of Ananis Nin. Dreams have logic. Landscapes are symbolic. Identities are not linear. She famously said that she cannot revisit herself of gone by years. That self does not exist. She cannot hold on to her image of yester years. This is stream of consciousness of the other order. The self dissolves and boundaries of time, space and place disappear. Physical reality gives way to emotional reality. This is the area of female subjectivity where creation is a necessity. ‘Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.’ [6]
Growth is the only way of survival. Suppression is not an option. If we suppress growth, and change; we torture ourselves. It is against the natural order of things. Taking inspiration from Nin, Elizabeth Appell writes, ‘And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to bloom.’
The writing of Nin is full of surreal magic. Freedom of spirit is the dominant force in her scheme of things. How could she be so unconventional? She openly defies the set definition of a women, her femininity, and her fate. In doing so, Ananis Nin raises the literary bar. With tools of stream of consciousness, like a super crafts maestro, she sculpts her words imagery perfectly. In this sense, she is a class apart. She says, ‘I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything which I cannot transform into marvelous, I let go. Reality does not impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.’ [7]
The views of Anais Nin on man-woman relationship are worth pondering. She elevates the relationship to mating of minds. A man and a woman as friends have the potential explore hitherto unknown psychological spheres. She views it as something on which existence depends. It is intense and it is internal. Man and woman are not opposites. She rejected docility, domesticity and passivity attributed to women. She stood for emotional equality. Any relationship becomes valuable because of its vulnerability. Vulnerability is to be cherished. For Nin, coming together of a man and a woman stood for a fascinating journey together; a voyage of self-discovery. Throughout her work, we see her total commitment to personal growth through friendship. She wanted men to be more sensitive towards women. The needs of women are not to be dismissed. Men and women are more similar than different. She intensely writes about the emotional, and spiritual longing of women. Women seek fulfilment and intimacy of soul. When one knows someone, one absorbs the qualities of that person. One becomes a new person in many measures. Our ability to be able to welcome someone into our psychological space defines the richness of our mind. A closed mind cannot be a friend. A rigid person is basically afraid; afraid of the unknown. Friendship is just the opposite. ‘Each friends represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.’ [8]
In friendships and in human contact, courage is important. She wants her interactions to be enriching and energizing. The partner must demand more and more. The friends should be fully there for each other. ‘ I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.’ [9]
It takes a mature mind and a profound approach to understand Anais Nin. She treated shallowness in life as death. She is an advocate of authentic living. Through the mundane, regular, worldly glasses, all this looks almost impossible. Meeting of minds and melting of souls - these ideas look far flung, unreal. But here is a woman who believed in it and lived it and wrote about it. That is what makes Anais Nin special. She is honest. Life is about living and not about dying a slow death each moment. We should keep being vulnerable; we should keep taking risks; and only by these means will we renew ourselves. Love must be replenished at its source. She famously said, ‘Love never dies a natural death. It dies of blindness, errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.’ [10]
Nin feared an unlived life more than death. Love keeps us young, warm, and likeable. The spirit should stay young. And there we can sum up our discussion. Living fully is the antidote of decay, decadence, and death. ‘I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.’ [11]
References
30-May-2026
More by : Prof. Shubha Tiwari