Larry disappeared behind a façade of obedience. There was a Sea of Tranquility on the moon. Larry lived there. There were no ruffles on the surface. Outwardly he conformed until his marriage to Lillian. Lillian having spent her childhood in Mexico, seemed to be a messenger from the happier days of Brazil.

"The relative smoothness of the lunar surface poses a question."

Much of men's energies were being spent on such questions, Lillian's on the formation of Larry's character. Their minds were fixed on space; hers on the convolutions of Larry's feelings.

Her vehement presence became the magnet. She summoned him back from solitude. She was curious about his feelings, about his silences, about his retractions. His mother's first wish that he should not exist at all was pitted against Lillian's wish that he exist in a more vivid and heightened way. She made a game of his retreats, pretended to discover his "caves." He was truly born in her warmth and her conviction of his existence.

How slender was the form he offered to the world's vision, how slender a slice of his self, a thin sliver of an eighth of the moon on certain nights. She was not deceived as to the dangers of another eclipse. She could hear, as you hear in musique concrète, the echo in vast space which corresponds to new dimensions in science, the echo which was never heard in classical music.

Lillian felt that in the husband playing the role of husband, in the scientist playing his role of scientist, in the father playing his role of father, there was always the danger of detachment. He had to be maintained on the ground, given a body. She breathed, laughed, stirred, and was tumultuous for him. Together they moved as one living body and Larry was passionately willed into being born, this time permanently. Larry, Larry, what can I bring you? Intimacy with the world? She was on intimate terms with the world. While he maintained a world in which Lillian was the only inhabitant, or at least the reigning one.

Such obsession with reaching the moon, because they had failed to reach each other, each a solitary planet! In silence, in mystery, a human being was formed, was exploded, was struck by other passing bodies, was burned, was deserted. And then it was born in the molten love of the one who cared.

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A CHRONOLOGY

1903 Anaïs Nin born in Neuilly, France

1913 Nin’s father abandons family

1914 Nin, her mother and two brothers come to New York; begins her diary, in French

1920 Begins to write her diary in English

1923 Marries Hugh P. Guiler, a banker, in Cuba

1924 Nin and Guiler move to Paris; Nin continues her diary and dabbles in fiction

1931 Meets controversial American novelist Henry Miller in Louveciennes, France

1932 Becomes Miller’s lover and is infatuated with his wife June; Edward Titus publishes Nin’s D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study