When you write consciously, you follow the most accessible thread. Three or four other threads may be agitated like telegraph wires at the same instant and I disregard them. If I were to capture them all I would be cornering the nimblest of minds, revealing simultaneously innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage. The whole truth! I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four pages to each of the present ones, I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and the overtones because of the slipperiness of embellishments, the vice of idealism which distorts the truth at every turn.
There's so much more I could quote from Nin: her talk of travels, her encounters with artists famous and not, her wrangling with the business of personal printing presses, her worries of a European war that did, eventually, happen (and her pain over the Spanish Civil War in particular and war in general); I wanted to quote something, even a little thing. Now I have. And it can be a reminder of how keeping a diary — like this blog — can help.