Day 23 - Elena - Anais Nin

While waiting for the train to Montreux, Elena looked at the people around her on the quays. Every trip aroused in her the same curiosity and hope one feels before the curtain is raised at the theater, the same stirring anxiety and expectation.  

She singled out various men she might have liked to talk with, wondering if they were leaving on her train or merely saying good-bye to other passengers. Her cravings were vague, poetic. If she had been brutally asked what she was expecting she might have answered, "Le Merveilleux". It was hunger that did not come from any precise region of her body. It was true, what someone had said about her after she had criticized a writer she had met: 'You cannot see him as he really is, you cannot see anyone as he really is. He will always be disappointing because you are expecting someone.'

She was expecting someone - every time a door opened, every time she went to a party, to any gathering of people, every time she entered a cafe, a theater. 

None of the men she had singled out as desirable companions for the trip boarded the train. So she opened the book she was carrying. It was Lady Chatterley's Lover. 

Afterwards Elena remembered nothing of this trip except a sensation of tremendous bodily warmth, as if she had drunk a whole bottle of the very choicest Burgundy, and a feeling of great anger at the discovery of a secret which it seemed to her was criminally withheld from all people. She discovered first of all that she had never known the sensations described by Lawrence, and second, that this was the nature of her hunger. But there was another truth she was now fully aware of. Something had created in her a state of perpetual defense against the very possibilities of experience, an urge for flight which took her from the scenes of pleasures and expansion. She had stood many times on the very edge, and then had run away. She herself was to blame for what she had lost, ignored. 

It was the submerged women of Lawrence's book that lay coiled within her, at last exposed, sensitized, prepared as if by a multitude of caresses for the arrival of someone.