Our Objects, Ourselves
By Maria Popova
Last week’s meditation on the psychology of identity in a material world reminded me of a passage from The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) — the same tome that gave us Nin on the meaning of life, why emotional excess is essential to creativity, and a prescient anecdote of gun control failure.
In September of 1944, amidst the physical and spiritual devastation of WWII, Nin writes in her diary:
The physical as a symbol of the spiritual world. The people who keep old rags, old useless objects, who hoard, accumulate: are they also keepers and hoarders of old ideas, useless information, lovers of the past only, even in its form of detritus?
[…]
I have the opposite obsession. In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use. I keep nothing to remind me of the passage of time, deterioration, loss, shriveling.
And yet we attach enormous significance to objects. But perhaps Henry Miller, Nin’s longtime lover and friend, had it right after all when he observed that “all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.”
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Published May 8, 2013
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https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/08/anais-nin-physical-spiritual/
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