BOOK Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of
Almost-Living
Galileo believed that books
are our only means of having superhuman powers. For Carl Sagan, a book was “proof
that humans are capable of working magic.” Proust
considered the
end of a book’s wisdom the beginning of our own. For Mary Oliver, books did nothing less than save
her life. The social function of great literature,
the poet Denise Levertov insisted, is “to
awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”
The transcendent mechanism of the awakening
that books furnish in us is what Anaïs Nin (February 21,
1903–January 14, 1977) explores in a beautiful entry from The
Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol. 1 .
A generation after Kafka wrote
to his best friend that “a book must be the axe for the
frozen sea inside us,” 28-year-old Nin writes in December of 1931:
You live like this, sheltered, in a
delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady
Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with [someone],
and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The
symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second
symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death):
absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness.
Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing
it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families.
They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a
book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
With a thankful eye to D.H. Lawrence — whose
writing, she believed, first awakened her in this fashion and whom, in a
gesture of gratitude, she made the subject of her
first book — Nin adds:
Some never awaken. They are like the
people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken. But I am not in danger
because my home, my garden, my beautiful life do not lull me. I am aware of
being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
Complement this particular portion of the
wholly numinous The
Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol. 1 with
Nin on why
emotional excess is essential for writing,
BRAIN PICKINGS
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