Free Children of the Albatross by Anaïs Nin Page B

and
stir her warmth into activity again, when he felt equal to plunging into it, to
lose himself in it, feeling the intoxication of the man who had conquered the
sea…
    Then he would write to her exultantly: you are
the sea…
    But she could see the little waves in himself
gathering power for the future, preparing for the moment when he would be the
engulfing onee inf>
    Then he seemed no longer the slender adolescent
with dreamy gestures but a passionate young man rehearsing his future scenes of
domination.

    He wore a white scarf through the gray streets
of the city, a white scarf of immunity. His head resting on the folds was the
head of the dreamer walking through the city selecting by a white magic to see
and hear and gather only according to his inner needs, slowly and gradually
building as each one does ultimately, his own world out of the material at hand
from which he was allowed at least a freedom of selection.
    The white scarf asserted the innumerable things
which did not touch him: choked trees, broken windows, cripples, obscenities
penciled on the walls, the lascivious speeches of the drunks, the miasmas and
corrosions of the city.
    He did not see or hear them.
    After traversing deserted streets, immured in
his inner dream, he would suddenly open his eyes upon an organ grinder and his
monkey.
    What he brought home again was always some
object by which men sought to overcome mediocrity: a book, a painting, a piece
of music to transform his vision of the world, to expand and deepen it.
    The white scarf did not lie.
    It was the appropriate flag of his voyages.
    His head resting fittingly on its white folds
was immune to stains. He could traverse sewers, hospitals, prisons, and none
left their odor upon him. His coat, his breath, his hair, when he returned,
still exhaled the odor of his dream.
    This was the only virgin forest known to man:
this purity of selection.
    When Paul returned with his white scarf
gleaming it was all that he rejected which shone in its folds.
    He was always a little surprised at older
people’s interest in him.
    He did not know himself to be the possessor of
anything they might want, not knowing that in his presence they were violently
carried back to their first dream.
    Because he stood at the beginning of the
labyrinth and not in the heart of it, he made everyone aware of the turn where
they had lost themselves. With Paul standing at the entrance of the maze, they
recaptured the beginning of their voyage, they remembered their first intent,
their first image, their first desires.
    They would don his white scarf and begin anew.
    And yet today she felt there was another
purity, a greater purity which lay in the giving of one’s self. She felt pure
when she gave herself, and Paul felt pure when he withdrew himself.

    The tears of his mother, the more restrained
severity of his father, brought him home again.
    His eighteenth birthday came and this was the
one they could not spend together, this being his birthday in reality, the one
visible to his parents. Whereas with Djuna he had spent so many birthdays which
his parents could not have observed, with their limited knowledge of him.
    They had not attended the birthday of his
manhood, the birthday of his roguish humorous self, of his first drunkenness,
his first success at a party; or the birthday of his eloquent self on the theme
of poetry, painting or music. Or the birthday of his imagination, his fantasy,
of his new knowledge of people, of his new assertions and his discoveries of
unknown powers in himself.
    This succession of birthdays that had taken
place since he left home was the highest fiesta ever attended by Djuna, the
spectacle of unpredictable blooms, of the shells breaking around his
personality, the emergence of the man.
    But his real birthday they could not spend
together.
    His mother made dinner for him, and he played
chess with his father—they who loved him less and who had bound and stifled him
with prohibitions, who had