Love

“There will remain, here in my journal, the things Henry has said. I receive them like gifts of jewels, incense, and perfumes. Henry’s words fall, and I catch them with such care that I forget to talk. I am the slave fanning him with peacock feathers. He talks about God, Dostoevsky, and the finesse of Fred’s writing. He draws a distinction between that finesse and his own dramatic, sensational, potent writing. He can say with humility, ‘Fred has a finesse which I lack, erudition, the quality of an Anatole France.’ And I say, ‘But don’t you see, he lacks the passion, just as France lacked it. It is what you have!’ At the thought of this, as we walk along a boulevard, I want to kiss the man whose passion rushes like lava through a chill intellectual world. I want to give up my life, my home, my security, my writing, to live with him, to work for him, to be a prostitute for him, anything, even to be fatally hurt by him.”

Anaïs Nin [1903-1977]