Another inspiration taken from science was information about birds. “Birds live their lives with an intensity as extreme as their brilliant colors and their vivid songs. The reserve air tanks provide fuel for the bird’s intensive life and at the same time add to its buoyancy in flight.” This I used for the theme of adolescence.

When I wanted to write about adolescence in Children of the Albatross, I chose words, images which would render this quality of evanescence, fluidity, and elusiveness of adolescents. I used the structure of the ballet as a pattern, suitable to the theme, for an overall design to express quick entrances and exits and light mobility of the young. I selected objects—a white scarf, a measuring tape, chopsticks, a knitted blanket—they favored.

Long before psychedelic luminous paints, I described Paul and Lawrence as touching up every object in the room with luminous paint. Then, when they turned off the lights, a new room appeared: “Luminous faces appeared on the walls, new flowers, new jewels, new castles, new jungles, new animals, all in filaments of light. Mysterious translucence like their unmeasured words, their impulsive acts, wishes, enthusiasms. Darkness was excluded from their world, the darkness of loss of faith. It was now the room with a perpetual sparkle, even in darkness. (They are making a new world for me, felt Djuna, a world of greater lightness.)”

Some of the characters in this book have already appeared in Ladders to Fire, and some characters, such as Uncle Philip, make their first appearance here and will reappear in later volumes. The books can therefore be considered as parts of a tapestry.

—Anaïs Nin, from Novel of the Future, 1968; prologue to the Dutton edition of Seduction, 1947.

The Sealed Room

THE SEALED ROOM

STEPPING OFF THE BUS at Montmartre Djuna arrived in the center of the ambulant Fair and precisely at the moment when she set her right foot down on the cobblestones the music of the merry-go-round was unleashed from its mechanical box and she felt the whole scene, her mood, her body, transformed by its gaiety exactly as in her childhood her life in the orphan asylum had been suddenly transformed from a heavy nightmare to freedom by her winning of a dance scholarship.

As if, because of so many obstacles her childhood and adolescence had been painful, heavy walking on crutches and had suddenly changed overnight into a dance in which she discovered the air, space and the lightness of her own nature.

Her life was thus divided into two parts: the bare, the pedestrian one of her childhood, with poverty weighing her feet, and then the day when her interior monologue set to music led her feet into the dance.

Pointing her toe towards the floor she would always think: I danced my way out of the asylum, out of poverty, out of my past.