“Amar sin poseer, Acompañar sin invadir, Vivir sin depender.”

— Anónimo

"La poesía es donde más pensamos, por eso la poesia es la menos leida"

Juan José Millás

"Poetry is where we think the most, that's why poetry is the least read."

Juan José Millás

Gillian Anderson reads Anaïs Nin's passionate letter about sex and poetry
From The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 3

In the 1940s, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and a small circle of other writers were commissioned by a wealthy, anonymous client referred to only as “The Collector” to write explicit, erotic stories for $1 per page. This client had a very particular request: he demanded that they “leave out the poetry” and “concentrate on sex.” However, Anaïs Nin, being the deeply poetic and literary writer she was, hated this restriction and found it suffocating. She didn’t believe in writing about sexuality without depth, emotion, and art. Frustrated by his demands, she wrote a scathing yet beautifully worded letter to the anonymous patron, in which she defended eroticism as an art form and refused to strip her writing of its lyrical, sensual, and psychological depth.

She was essentially saying that eroticism is not just raw sex; it is an art form that should be infused with feeling, beauty, and complexity.