How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully

By Maria Popova

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

Nin herself — a woman uncommonly liberated from the common traps of convention, control, and self-consciousness — took up the spiritual mechanics of this paradox in her first published book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (public library), composed when she was still in her twenties.

With an eye to D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) and his “philosophy that was against division,” his “plea for whole vision,” she writes:

When the realization came to the moderns of the importance of vitality and warmth, they willed the warmth with their minds. But Lawrence, with the terrible flair of the genius, sensed that a mere mental conjuring of the elemental was a perversion… Lawrence believed that the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. The livingness of the body was natural; the interference of the mind had created divisions, the consciousness of wrong-doing or well-doing.

In a sentiment central to my own animating ethos, she adds:

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

It was Lawrence’s own writing that awakened in her this awareness of ongoingness and the urgency of total aliveness — the way “livingness is the axis of his world, the light, the gravitation, and electromagnetism of his world.”

In his 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence makes a stunning case for the indivisibility of it all — the beauty and the sorrow, the ache and the astonishment:

All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.

This was the foundational philosophy of Lawrence’s worldview — the pulse-beat that makes his writing so resonant and eternally alive, the way all great spiritual texts are. He distilled this view in an especially beautiful passage from his 1923 novel Kangaroo, reckoning with the most universal reality of life — the reality we spend our lives fighting, yet the one that peeks through in all of our greatest works of art and highest triumphs of the creative spirit. Echoing Whitman’s defense of our inner multitudes, often at odds with each other, he writes in an era when every woman was a “man” purely as a matter of linguistic convention:

If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise — or nearly so — and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, life’s ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.

In the same epoch when Hermann Hesse so beautifully defended the wisdom of the inner voice, Lawrence’s protagonist makes a passionate case for listening to the song of life as it reverberates through the singular cathedral of each self, yours and mine, as it did for Nin and Lawrence and every other great mind long sung out of existence:

I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life.

Complement with Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness and Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Nin on the meaning of maturity and how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living.

Source: How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully – The Marginalian

France Buys Back Bordeaux

China’s love affair with Bordeaux properties is ending as more investors bring châteaux back into French hands. Read the latest wine news & features on wine-searcher

By James Laurence

In 2011, well-heeled Chinese businessmen made the leap from quaffing Bordeaux to owning Bordeaux.

Château de Viaud in Lalande de Pomerol was the first headline estate to be sold, purchased by a state-run agricultural conglomerate, the COFCO group. Subsequently, more than 150 properties changed hands between 2011 and 2019, including Château Latour-Laguens, Lezongars, Chenu-Lafitte, Richelieu and Monlot. At the time, many predicted this trend would continue for the foreseeable  – particularly if the château was pleasing to the eye.

However, the Chinese Communist Party decided in 2019 that enough was enough; restrictions on global capital flows were severely tightened, much to the chagrin of real estate companies like Vineyards-Bordeaux. As a result, the number of transactions plummeted and cash-starved estates had to look elsewhere for salvation. And then Covid-19 happened.

Yet not everyone wept tears over the diminishing influence of outside investors. Bordeaux ain’t no Paris – this is a largely conservative region that has made some concessions to modernity. Nevertheless, a mistrust of a sudden influx of newcomers, bordering on xenophobia, reached fever pitch after several properties were renamed by their new Chinese landlords; the late author Philippe Sollers even wrote to the erstwhile prime minister and Bordeaux mayor, Alain Juppé, to complain about this “sacrilegious” act.

Buy back better

The vineyards in question – Clos Bel Air, Châteaux Senilhac, Tour Saint Pierre and Larteau – were acquired by Mr Chi Keung Tong and his business partner between 2016-17 at a knockdown price; as per usual, families were forced to sell due to the prohibitively high French inheritance taxes (30 percent) and a lack of interest from the surviving children. Within a short time, however, Larteau had been renamed Imperial Rabbit and Senilhac was rebranded as Château Tibetan Antelope.  Eyebrows were raised higher than Mont Blanc, and many predicted this obvious gimmick would fail.

It turns out they were right: Chi Keung Tong sold his acquisitions to a French duo in 2022. “Initially, the foreign buyers did invest money to develop their châteaux, however, due to the Covid-19 period and the economic crisis in China, they were not able to continue to run them,” explains co-owner Denis Chazarain.

“Moreover, the renaming of historical châteaux, properties that boasted established reputations and long histories, created confusion for consumers, even in China. The truth is that Chinese consumers look for stately imagery and pedigree – it was commercial suicide to use these ‘funky’ names.”

Denis Chazarain, and his associate David Caillaud, set up the company Les Domaines de l’Emissaire in 2022 – they purchased the four estates for an undisclosed sum that same year. Their first task, after making an initial inspection, was to banish Imperial Rabbit and Tibetan Antelope to the history books and reinstall the original monikers. Then the hard work began.

“Our number-one priority was sourcing good permanent staff – this was a major challenge as the previous owners used third-party providers on an ad hoc basis,” says Chazarain. “Thankfully, we now have a good team in place – individuals who understand the vineyards and the terroir. One of our key objectives was to start working on a parcel-by-parcel basis, rather than the previous approach of simply vinifiying the entire crop.”

The portfolio certainly has real potential. Château Senilhac is a sizable Haut-Médoc estate with clay-limestone soils, while Clos Bel Air (2.3 hectares) offers an authentic slice of Pomerol garagiste winemaking – “We really do make wine in a garage,” enthuses Chazarain – and high-potential sandy/gravel terroir. Meanwhile, Château Tour Saint Pierre comes with 11.5 hectares of prime vineyards that were formerly owned by the mayor of Saint-Émilion; Larteau is classified as a Bordeaux Supérieur, located south of the Dordogne River close to the town of Arveyres. Like Bel Air, these are Merlot-dominant wines that slot nicely into the “affordable Bordeaux” category. Tourism is also a major focus for the owners, with ongoing renovations at Larteau to expand its potential as a wedding/seminar venue.

“We have also invested in the land, replanting around 5 hectares, in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the vineyards, engaging them also in a process of environmental certification and biodiversity management, in all properties,” says Chazarain.

“In addition, we have upgraded the equipment, both for viticulture and winemaking, renovating the cellar of Clos Bel Air and constructing a brand new one for Tour Saint Pierre in Saint-Émilion Grand Cru. We have also created some new brands, such as a Cabernet Sauvignon rosé called l’Aerial, and a new Merlot wine l’Improbable.”

New markets

Meanwhile, Chazarain is busy planning for the Wine Paris trade fair in February 2024. But, the biggest priority is to expand distribution of Les Domaines de l’Emissaire’s collection of wines in a saturated global market fraught with geopolitical turbulence and falling consumption. Does that worry him?

“Competition is just an opportunity to improve and to be innovative – we believe in the expansion of new markets which are not yet familiar with wine consumption,” he replies.

“We are especially proud of the expansion we see in north Asia; we will complete the investments started in 2023, especially the completion of the new cellar in Tour Saint Pierre in Saint-Émilion and the opening of our renovated rooms in Château Larteau in March 2024. The replanting program continues apace and Wine Paris is the perfect opportunity to showcase our new labels.”

This ongoing project to resuscitate châteaux acquired by hands-off investors, and then left to decline, is likely to become a key theme of 2024. Ten years ago, Château Loudenne was sold to the Chinese group Kweichow Moutai who, it should be said, invested several million euros into the venture. Nevertheless, success eluded the firm and it was purchased by the French businessman Christophe Gouache in 2022.

Source: France Buys Back Bordeaux | Wine-Searcher News & Features