Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Nin suggests that friendship is not merely companionship but a creative force that awakens latent parts of the self. Each person we befriend “represents a world in us” because they draw out capacities, memories, desires, and ways of seeing that might otherwise remain unrealized. The “world not born until they arrive” frames identity as relational and dynamic: we become different people in the presence of different intimacies. The final clause—“only by this meeting that a new world is born”—treats encounter as generative, implying that human connection produces genuinely new inner landscapes rather than simply revealing what was already there.