Lillian was too strong, too powerful and could not find a balanced relationship. The groove she followed automatically was that of mother and child. She carries within her a wish for the hero, but in life she falls in love with his opposite. The man of power needs no mother. One can see in the novel that she makes impossible wishes: she responds and relates to the childlike in man, and then laments that this child cannot be a husband. She is all contraries. She demands yieldingness and decries dependency. She is drawn to passivity and demands activity. These ever contradictory impulses end in a draw. The fear dictates certain choices which do not correspond to the deepest wish of all. She forces her strength into relationships which cannot contain it. Because of the imbalance in her selections (experiment with the unsuitable element in chemistry), she cannot find a mate suited to her true nature. Yet she attains a fusion and balance at the end of Seduction of the Minotaur. Why? Because she could receive the eloquent messages directly from nature. Through the senses (which she feared to yield to sensually) she was able to become at one with nature (her nature) through the Doctor’s insights.

The dialogue between the Doctor and Lillian is not a psychoanalytic dialogue. He is a man of great humanity and wisdom. He observes her dislocation. He is killed. It was the first time I accepted a physical death. It was frequent, natural, and consistent with life in Mexico. It also forced Lillian out of her evasions.

–Anaïs Nin, from Novel of the Future, 1968

SOME VOYAGES HAVE THEIR INCEPTION in the blueprint of a dream, some in the urgency of contradicting a dream. Lillian's recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed.

She had landed in the city of Golconda, where the sun painted everything with gold, the lining of her thoughts, the worn valises, the plain beetles, Golconda of the golden age, the golden aster, the golden eagle, the golden goose, the golden fleece, the golden robin, the goldenrod, the goldenseal, the golden warbler, the golden wattles, the golden wedding, and the gold fish, and the gold of pleasure, the goldstone, the gold thread, the fool's gold.

With her first swallow of air she inhaled a drug of forgetfulness well known to adventurers.

Tropic, from the Greek, signified change and turning. So she changed and turned and was metamorphosed by the light and caressing heat into a spool of silk. Every movement she made from that moment on, even the carrying of her valise, was softened and pleasurable. Her nerves, of which she had always been sharply aware, had become instead strands from a spool of silk, spiraling through the muscles.