When I posted recently about most of my notebooks being stuck in a storage unit, a sympathetic commenter named Anna replied:
“I feel your pain! Just remember–Anais Nin kept her diaries in a bank vault. Somewhere there’s a photo of her (perhaps in the vault?) surrounded by notebooks in a disorganized pile.”
I had no idea and had never seen this photo, but easily found it online:
A prolific diarist was Anais Nin. She began keeping diaries from the ripe old age of eleven and continued until her death. The diary was her best friend—a vice and a drug—her opium pipe. Her mother, therapists, and friend Henry Miller all tried to break her of the addiction, to no avail….
It seemed only appropriate to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a post about Anaïs Nin, since she is so famous for her erotica as well as her journals!
Read more about Nin and some other famous journal-keepers: From Dante to the Marquis de Sade—Their Journals Tell All | Readers Unbound
I pasted that picture on a volume of my diary from I think ’94 or ’95. The greatest artists are the creative liberators, the ones who make you feel you can do your own art too. She’s definitely one of mine.
“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”