SOURCE: "The Bread of Tradition: Reflections on the Diary of Anaïs Nin," in Prairie Schooner, Vol. XLV, No. 2, Summer 1971, pp. 161-67.

In the following essay, McEvilly interprets Nin's writing in her diary as a poetic examination of the self.

("I'm the alchemist, not the ego." Nin)

In the world of Proust the sound of the spoon and the taste of the madeleine were able to efface the ego and to allow the mysterious person—"that person," as Proust himself says, as though he were, in his ecstatic illumination, like those ancient Indian seers who when they had reached that level beneath the state of dreamless sleep could designate it only by the neutral, and yet quite fecund, word That, which in Sanskrit is even more neutral for it may be pronounced without the benefit of teeth, so that even an ancient seer in that final stage of...