Beyond Reason

     I have paid the price for not breaking away from the bourgeois world and living altogether as an artist. Why, why didn't I have the ultimate courage to live beyond reach of all laws and taboos, to be what I am, as Genêt is what he is, committed to no one, subjected to no restrictions, 'Le poète maudit,' and live with those who obey no taboos, and not as I am doing, living in the wrong world for the sake of protection, as my father did, a protection for which you pay with your life. The protection which conventional life offers, with its rules, structure, legalities, etc., is also a total loss of freedom.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. VI, 1955-1966, Gaunther Stuhlmann (ed.), p. 23.

     Aldous Huxley and I disagree about the necessity of drugs for everyone. When I took LSD, I proved to myself that it only opened the same realms which one can have access to by way of dreams, poetry, writing. I wrote House of Incest without it.
     Huxley and I do not communicate. He is too much the scientist and not a poet. I cannot imagine his friendship with Lawrence. They must have argued a lot. I find him too scientific, too literal, too precise. I still feel, as I always have, that the effort made to live, love and create without artificial stimulants is part of the enrichment. It strengthens the creative will, whereas those who are passive and fond of shortcuts will never be vigorous creators. There is also the matter of connecting the visions to create one's life. Drug users do not take that second step. They see paradise, and decide they will return to the vision of it, and not bother with seeking to create it as Varda did. Michaux is an exception. He is still one of the great writers after ten years of using drugs, but that is because he was a powerful poet before he took drugs.
— Anaïs Nin, Ibid., p. 132.

     "Suffering consists in being unable to reveal oneself and, when one happens to succeed in doing so, in having nothing more to say."
— Andrè Gide, The White Notebook, p. 43.

     "Et non erat qui cognosceret me" ... Nor the others, for souls can not know each other. The courses followed by these who are most nearly alike are still PARALLEL.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., p. 45.

     "Reason!" they say, and to me this is sheer arrogance. What has their Reason done?
     It is always contrasted with the soul; when the heart acts, reason interferes.
     It is repulsed by devotion. The sublime is always ridiculous. Daring, poetry — everything that makes life worth living is foolish. Reason would protect us; it is utilitarian, but it makes life intolerable to the soul!
     It is despised by true lovers, for one who loves no longer lives for himself. His life is but a means of loving. If he finds one which is better and which will make for closer union, he will neglect — perhaps reject, forget — his own life in favor of it.
     I have never had any happiness which reason sanctions.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., p. 52.

     I am almost ashamed to quote the words of Lessing, repeated by Goethe in his Elective Affinities, words so well-known that they bring a smile to  the lips: "Es wandelt niemand unbestraft unter Palmen," words that can be translated only by the fairly trite sentence: "No one walks with impunity under palm trees." What is meant but this: Though we leave their shade, we are never the same again.
     I have read it, put it back on the shelf in my library — but there were certain words in that book which I cannot forget. They have penetrated so deeply into me that I cannot separate them from myself. Henceforth I am no longer the one I was before I met them. Though I may forget the book in which I read them, though I remember them only imperfectly — this is of little importance; no longer will I be the person I was before I read them. How can their power be explained?
     Their power comes from the fact that they have merely revealed to me some part of myself of which I was still in ignorance; for me they were only an explanation — yes, but an explanation of myself. It has already been said that influences act through resemblances. They have been compaired to mirrors of a kind that might show us not what we already are in actual fact, but what we are in terms of our latent characteristics.
....
     In comparison, what matters all I learn through my brain, all that I succeed in retaining only by a great effort of memory? Thus through learning I can accumulate within me weighty treasures, a great encumbering wealth, a fortune, a precious instrument, to be sure, but forever, to the end of time, different from me. The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.
     This type of knowledge bears no similarity to that intimate cognition which can be termed rather recognition mixed with love — true recognition, like a feeling of kinship rediscovered.
— Andrè Gide, Pretexts, from "Four Lectures," p. 26-27.