October, 1943 Summary and Analysis

29. When the son of a black friend, Millicent, is shot in a gang war Nin goes to the hospital in Harlem and is turned away because they do not want "white blood." She returns to her ruminations about art and reality, dreaming and loneliness. She draws a distinction between her "adult fairytales" and herself, emphasizing that she is not the same person as when she wrote them and is not contained within them. "The whole duality lies between what is dreamt and what is actualized," she writes. "The dreaming gives anxiety because it is lonely, ghostly, evanescent, unstable, fluid but above all because it is lonely." Nin realizes that the writer and artist can do nothing more about the human condition with all its suffering than describe it. However, by connecting herself and her work to all of mankind, she believes...