We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
--Anais Nin
There is info on Anais Nin here. My friend Tiffany might just as well have said this quote, only her take was that romantic comedies mess with the mind and so at one time she avoided them like I avoid horror flicks... because of their lasting imprint. I guess hope in the fantasy was something she couldn't afford and I am starting to agree. Does that mean I am giving up the dream, my hope is evaporating, I am growing cynical in my old age? No. I think it means I am realizing now more than ever that happily ever after is an awful lot of work.
9 comments:
"happily ever after is an awful lot of work" - is that a quote from you? I like it.
I THINK it's a quote from me... but who the heck knows these days... :)
Did you have a nice birthday?
I agree about the romantic comedies. Someone once said that falling in love is easy. Staying in love is the hard part. All true, yet the romantic comedy is an illusion because they can't show the two love birds paying their taxes, doing the laundry, discussing holiday travel plans, buying a new washer...all very unromantic, but realistic things. The best thing a person can do is create a type of ratio of romance to reality.
Good Lord! I wonder as to the genesis of such a dour post! And I marvel at the bizarre juxtaposition of Anaïs Nin's words and name with such concepts! "Happily Ever After," indeed! Never has such a thing existed at any time or place in the real world, and though Anaïs Nin would have been among the first to acknowledge that fact, she was hardly one to forsake the world of dreams. In that true "happiness" seldom manifests itself in the culmination of ANY series of external events, Nin-- while wisely never advocating the drugery of "hard work" for the purpose of acheiving that which, thereby, is unobtainable-- would have never denigrated fantasy or the realm of dreams as being for naught. In Nin's view, it was primarily through the powers inherent, only, in one's dream world that the more glorious aspects of reality could most efficaiously be realized-- and, clearly, it was not Freud's "dream world" to which she referred.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
--Anais Nin
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
--Anais Nin
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
--Anais Nin
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
--Anais Nin
Dreams are necessary to life.
--Anais Nin
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
--Anais Nin
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
--Anais Nin
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
--Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
--Anais Nin
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
--Anais Nin
Marvin,
Dour? Really? Hmmm...
The genesis of the post was the Anais Nin quote, of course. I found it in an old notebook and got to thinking about how Disney has taken the fairy tale and sort of created their own version of "hollywood endings" and that fairy tales often involve the helpless woman, the need for rescue.... I thought of my friend Pam who said that no one should have rescued Snow White from that glass coffin because she was damn annoying. :) I thought about the "happily ever after" promised by fairy tales and decided yes... perhaps Anais Nin had it right. We HAVE been poisoned by fairy tales and think that it's all going to just fall into our laps.... "someday my prince will come" and "bibbity bobbidi boo" it will all be perfect.
I think perhaps you didn't fully "get" the point of my post and that's my fault for being cryptic. Clearly "Happily Ever After" doesn't exist as a right or something every good girl deserves... that IS my point.
Your quotes were great and this one illustrates the point I was trying to end with ...
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
--Anais Nin
or even this one....
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
--Anais Nin
(she's a gem, Anais Nin, isn't she?)
I think perhaps you didn't fully "get" the point of my post, either. The primary thrust of my remarks was that your single quote from Anaïs Nin was hardly representative of her overall worldview. Among modern age authors, Nin (and, perhaps to an even greater extent, her friend/ lover/ confidant, H. Miller) viewed life as fraught with endless possibilities, limited only by the scope of one's dreams and fantasies! Nin (and Miller certainly) viewed "hard work" (apart from the discipline of writing) as something to be avoided, not as an unavoidable evil, necessary in the struggle to attain, or to maintain a state of relative "happiness."
As for the "dourness" I found in your cryptic message, the line which expresses it best would probably be: "I guess hope in the fantasy was something she couldn't afford and I am starting to agree." In those words, I discerned a morose note that you may not have intended; but, in any case, that line strikes me as antithetical to the worldview promoted by the likes of Anaïs Nin and Miller.
Well, I guess I wasn't aiming at depicting a worldview of Anais Nin or Henry Miller so much as airing my own musing, however in line it was or was not with Ms. Nin Though from the sounds of it there might be a great post in all that after all... Their worldviews, I mean.
A great post on the relative nature of various Weltanschauungs would be nice. Go for it! [...Personally, though, I find that the best world view is the one which most readily allows, logically, for that "set of all sets which do not contain themselves as members."]
And who on Earth is that "Just Spencer" person who was pretending to be me, anyway? He/she seems like an obnoxious retard to me!
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