A Spy in the House of Love

I finished the Anaïs Nin novel I borrowed from Vince in one sitting. Not that it was a long read, just 166 short pages of delightful, sensual, though sometimes forcedly metaphoric, language. And I know why I was so riveted by it---not as a novel (the actual story leaves much to be desired), but as a character study, an exploration of the psyche of a woman with an inner fluctuating compass and an addiction to multiplicity.

She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life’s physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moonrays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad of lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours . . . When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

And yes, Sabina's character fascinates me. Whereas others would call her frivolous and unfaithful, I'd say she's simply restless and earnest in a quest for (not love, not artistic power) something she can't single out. She wants too much. And her voice strangely resonates with some of my poetic personae. Especially when she talks about the sadness of folding paper parasols in the rain, the need to reveal as well as conceal with her words even when conversing with friends, and her obsession with the idea of happiness, which she defines as the absence of fever. And this:

In the multiple peregrinations of love, Sabina was quick to recognize the echoes of larger loves and desires. The large ones, particularly if they had not died a natural death, never died completely and left reverberations. Once interrupted, broken artificially, suffocated accidentally, they continued to exist in separate fragments and endless smaller echoes. . . . The echoes struck at first through the mysterious instrumentation of the senses which retained sensations as instruments retain a sound after being touched. The body remained vulnerable to certain repetitions long after the mind believed it had made a clear, a final severance.

After a string of loves and blurred identities, Sabina ends up feeling dispersed, fractured, like a split atom, or, as she witnesses, a postmodern painting where it's still possible to reconstruct a human figure out of the constellated, distorted fragments. How to piece herself together again? Beethoven's Quartets provide the clue at the end: continuity, repetition of a single pattern, harmony. The book ends before we find out if she does find a way to be faithful and single. But isn't there any other way?