“We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.”
So said Anais Nin, a woman whose journaling began at age 11 and continued throughout her long life. She described her relationship with the psychoanalyst Otto Rank soon after their contact:
As he talked, I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feeling, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless.
How hard is it to understand others — to see them in full as they wish to be seen? To what degree can every word, thought, and expression be fathomed as it emerges, and when it does not?
Consider the quotation above. How much of a flavor is retained? To what extent does the act of remembering itself transform what has happened, even as it fades and alters with age?
The celephane-wrapped freshness of our past recedes in favor of a modified reminiscence.
Nin recognized something else. She was a student of psychoanalysis and realized that she required more than one language to convey what best fit her desire to communicate.
As Wikipedia notes, “she (first) wrote in French and did not begin to write in English until she was 17.[11] Nin believed that French was the language of her heart, Spanish was the (tongue) of her ancestors, and English…the (dialect) of her intellect. The writing in her diaries is (therefore)…trilingual.”
Our reflections change as we contemplate our former selves, our loves and losses, our encounters with books, work, failure, and success in a changing world. The growth and metamorphosis brought by aging offer new perspectives.
Heraclitus reminds us, “no man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
Time is a master teacher if we listen to its voice.
To the good, laughter survives in the form of stories, along with some of our private sentiment.
Enough.
In a week, will you recognize yours truly at my unchanging keyboard? Will you think of me as you do now? And what will your mirror hold?
Ask Anais Nin and Heraclitus.
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All of the images are sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Woman Writing with a Pen is the work of Kristin Hardwick. It is followed by Anais Nin as a Teenager about 1920. Finally, Nin’s Signature.
