Anais Nin's Ambivalence

"I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain."

......

The first thing June and Henry would do would be to initiate us into poverty, starvation, drabness just to share their sufferings. That is the weakest way of enjoying life: to let it whip you. By conquering misery we are creating a future independence of being such as they will never know.... darling, we will know a freedom they have never known. I'm a bit sick of this Russian wallowing in pain. Pain is something to master, not to wallow in."

- Anais Nin, Henry and June

It is only with Tim, and Tim's love, and my love for Tim, that I can appreciate this book (which reminds me so much of me a me in a phase that is already past) to the full extent - and also with sober detachment, be it Anais' destructive, if also poetic, obsession with June; or her soberness in seeing that as wrong and putrid.

And what is so precious about Henry and June is that June was never portrayed as a bitch, despite apparently being one. There is no bitterness, no hatred. June was depicted - romanticized, idolized and idealized with such passion, and she was indulged, spoilt and lavished with love. Which reveals that the true precense here is not June, it is Anais' truthfulness, genuineness, innocence and selflessness, and Anais as a person who is full of feelings, compassions and sentimentality.