The Winter of Artifice: A Facsimile of the Original 1939 Paris Edition (Villa Seurat) (Villa Seurat) by Nin Anaïs

Author:Nin, Anaïs [Nin, Anaïs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics
ISBN: 9780977485116
Amazon: 0977485110
Goodreads: 2183873
Publisher: Sky Blue Press
Published: 1948-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

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His lumbago and the almost complete paralysis it brought about seemed to me like a stiffness in the joints of his soul, from acting and pretending. He had assumed so many roles, had disciplined himself to appear always gay, always immaculate, always shaved, always faultless; he had played at love so often, that it was as if he suffered from a cramp due to the false positions too long sustained. He could never relax. The lumbago was like the stiffness and brittleness of his emotions which he had constantly directed. It was something like pain for him to move about easily in the realm of impulses. He was now as incapable of an impulse as his body was incapable of moving, incapable of abandoning himself to the great uneven flow of life with its necessary disorder and necessary ugliness. Every gesture of meticulous care taken to eat without vulgarity, to wash his teeth, to disinfect his hands, to behave ideally, to sustain the illusion of perfection, was like a rusted hinge, for when a pattern and a goal, when an aesthetic order penetrates so deeply into the motions of life, it eats into its spontaneity like rust, and this mental orientation, this forcing of nature to follow a pattern, this constant defeat of nature and control of it, had become rust, the rust which had finally paralyzed his body…

I wondered how far back I would have to trace the current of his life to find the moment at which he had thus become congealed into an attitude… At what moment had his will petrified his emotions? What shock, what incident had produced this mineralization such as took place under the earth, due to pressure?

When he talked about his childhood I could see a luminous child always dancing, always running, always alert, always responsive. His whole nature was on tip toes with expectancy, hope and ardor. The nose sniffed the wind with high expectations of storms, tragedies, adventures, beauty. The eyes did not retreat under the brow, but were opened wide like a clairvoyant’s. The flesh was tender, the appetite keen, the restlessness immense. Everything then seemed fluid and mobile, soft and pliable and yielding.

I could not trace the beginning of his disease, this cancer of jealousy. Perhaps far back—in his jealousy of his delicate sister who was preferred by the father, in his jealousy of the man who took his fiancée away from him, in the betrayal of this fiancée, in the immense shock of pain which sent him out of Spain to Cuba.

To-day if he read a clipping which did not give him the first place, in the realm of music, he suffered. If a friend turned his admiration away… If in a room he was not the centre of attention… Wherever there was a rival, he felt the fever and the poison of self-doubt, the fear of defeat. In all his relations with man and woman there had to be a battle and a triumph.

He began

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