Phyllis, our neighbor on the left, daughter of a Swedish farmer, left her three children with me Sunday so that she could see the horse show with her husband. The baby is only a few months old, so I changed ten diapers and fed him two bottles. And everyone was laughing to see me in that role! […] Complete cycle of human experience!
I have now known community living. But I am still convinced that these people who are so proud of giving birth and raising three children are giving less to the world than Beethoven, or Paul Klee, or Proust. It is their conviction of their virtuousness which distresses me. I would like to see fewer children and more beauty around them, fewer children and more educated ones, fewer children and more food for all, more hope and less war. I was not proud at all of having helped three children with faces like puddings or oatmeal to live through a Sunday afternoon. I would have felt prouder if I had written a quartet to delight many generations.
These years in the Sierra Madre, with relationships based entirely on human fraternity, proved to me that simple human life as laid out by uncreative human beings is impossible for creative people because it is narrow, monotonous and not deeply nourishing. Kindness, peace, routine, are not enough. I get desperately restless.
The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 6, 1955-1966