Reflections on Living…”You must not fear, hold back…”
I have been writing a review this morning of the wonderful shake & stir’s “Animal Farm”, and that has caused me to ponder on what it takes to change the status quo…
anyway i ended up on this website:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/03/anais-nin-on-emotion-and-writing/
and was moved by Anais Nin’s diary entry…so here is a gift if you want it, (have a read shake & stir) …lets all keep being excessive!!!!! and lets not grow weary! Lets not be a Mr. Jones (not you Lewis! THE Mr. Jones in Animal Farm!)
… the following quote is from a letter of advice written by Anais Nin and sent to a seventeen-year-old aspiring author:
“I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life [which I witnessed in shake & stir's Animal Farm]… I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love
[…]
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.” — with Nelle Lee and 2 others.
