excerpt from HENRY AND JUNE by Anaïs Nin

As I look at Henry talking I realize again that it is his sensuality I love. I want to go deeper into it, I want to wallow in it, to taste it as profoundly as he has, as June has. I feel this with a kind of desperation, a secret resentment, as if Hugo and Allendy and even Henry himself all wanted to stop me, whereas I know that it is I who stop myself. I am terribly in love with Henry, so why doesn't restlessness, fever, curiosity become attenuated? I am steaming with energy, with desires for long voyages (I want to go to Bali), and last night during a concert I felt like Mary Rose in Barrie's play, who hears music while visiting an island, walks away and disappears for twenty years. I felt that I could walk out of my house like a somnambulist, forgetting utterly, as in that hotel room, all my connections and go forth into a new life. Each day there are more demands from me that deprive me of the liberty I need, Hugo's growing demands of my body, Allendy's demands on the noblest in me, Henry's love, which makes me a submissive and faithful wife - all this, against the adventure I must constantly renounce and sublimate. When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.