Word: likeness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...HAVE been inundated by biographies and memoirs; Hemingway's Moveable Feast. the interminable studies of Joyce's Paris years, the histories of manic Surealists like Breton or Michel Leiris. If the Diaries belong to this tradition, still their achievement is in something more: the unearthing of a sensibility diminished by the wracking crises of the years between 1939 and 1944, and yet able to go on. Anais Nin's shared preoccupations with psychoanalysis pervade the entries in this volume; Otto Rank appears in the beginning pages as the mysterious influence he was in Nin's life, but by this time...
...like this now, imagine what it was before. Our fathers dressed in their World War II uniforms. listening to Roosevelt on the radio: things like this happened before most of us were born, so they belong to the indistinct memory of books, to the chronicle of another age. It's sad to think of what we missed. And it is possible to be nostalgic for a world we never knew. This must be why the still fixity of photographs recalls so much, why an album of snapshots from James Joyce's Paris days is as suggestive as Ulysses...
...confused group of artists haranguing the errors of history, she chose to live among them and preserve a subtle grace. Always in the third volume of the Diary, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann from an enormous collection of notebooks, there is the impression of intensity, but also of ease: like a caged bird. she struggles against the imprisoning bars. then waits, taut, exhausted, for the summoning of energy...
...letter from Miller in Hollywood complains that "people are poor in spirit, low, mean, envious." Everywhere is the sense of chaos, of a suffocating cosmos. What is most remarkable about the Diary is its evocation of an age: Miller, Eugene O'Neill, the moribund Kenneth Patchen: they move like ghosts through the long years of the War. animated, prodded back into life in the pages of Nin's journal...
...time was paralyzed; the photographs included in Diaries III encourage an emotion very much like what we have when looking over the family album. Only instead of a vague reminiscence, the thought of relatives we knew ten years ago, there is a jarring of the intellect; the moment of rebellion is stunned into life. Edgar Varese in his studio. Nin printing her own works in an attic on Macdougal Street, Robert Duncan as a boy: they all appear, either as apparitions in the photographs or in the text...