Anais Nin

If she were alive she would be celebrating her 103rd birthday, today!

After years of listening to Jewel, curiosity finally got the best of me and I hopped into Borders on Broadway on my lunch hour last Friday and purchased the sliver of a book entitled "The Sensitive Man and Other Essays" by Anais Nin.

I have devoured that particular collection of vignettes and placed an order for her entire collection of diaries...including the four volumes of the EARLY years which are seldom included in the collective acclaim her diaries receieved during her life. That is rare for an autobiographical work--diaries specifically for that matter. Those usually get their due posthumously. Arthur Ashe being my favorite example.

Though I'm not a stunning beauty who modelled at age 16, I find myself relating to Anais Nin. She boarded an oceanliner with her mother from Paris to New York at age 9, leaving her father beheind. She travelled extensively and wrote eloquently. She was eager to convey the texture and feel of a place. She studied psychology, was analyzed by Otto Rank (little known to lay people but a cult figure in the psych community) and pushes the psychic agenda of Carl Jung. She remains for women and their rights whilst remaining a Freudian in her psychodynamic predispositions. She never claimed to be a feminist but she shaped the "difference feminism" movement with her work.

It is not inspite but partly because of the heinous truths revealed about her in the recent biography by Diedre Bair that I love Anais more. It makes her real, it strips away the perfection she portrays in her journals--nay, it enhances the independent woman she drew up when women needed her to be. Her husband tolerated her affairs. He financed her travels and he loved/supported the woman she was. Even her incestuous affair with her father plays into the understanding of her deep-seated attachment to psychology, particularly the intrapsychic and unconscious.

I wish I could have met her. Today I devote as a tribute to Anais Nin. The woman in all of us.