Monday morning

17 April 2017

— Five pink hyacinths looking absolutely delighted to be out there in the garden.

Good Morning All,

Today’s entry, a celebration of Africa, includes two snapshots by Britta, who kindly passed along her photographic talents to her kids. The one on the left depicts the road down from the gate toward the big stone house where she and her sisters and brother grew up. The purple tree in the background is one of the many her sister Esther planted along both sides of the road to create a canopy. I’m pretty sure I can see a bit of the rubber tree Britta and I planted, even though frost occasionally comes to those highlands.

The photograph on the right is the view from the bay window of the big house or while standing out in my mother-in-law’s rose garden. It was the backdrop, sort of the cathedral tapestry, for Britt’a and my wedding. You can see a small fenced-in paddock in the foreground and many small  maize fields, fallow now in winter, surrounded by bushes.

And today is Karen Blixen’s birthday, better known to most people outside Denmark as Isak Dinesen. No less a luminary in my life than Holden Caulfied alerted me to her wonderful semi-memoir Out of Africa. She and Hans Christian Andersen are the Mark Twain and Edgar Alan Poe of our tiny little country. 

My Danish friends might say, however, that Edgar Alan Poe and Mark Twain are the Hans Christian Andersen and Karen Blixen of America.

If you have not read much of her, you have missed things. A few quotes:

1.  I don’t believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.

2. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

3. "Are you sure," she asked, "that it is God whom you serve?”

The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently. “That," he said, "that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of this world have to run!" 

4. Man and woman are two locked rooms, of which each contains the key to the other.

5. I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.

6. The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.

7. White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone.

8. I think Marilyn [Monroe] is bound to make an almost overwhelming impression on the people who meet her for the first time. It is not that she is pretty, although she is of course almost incredibly pretty, but she radiates, at the same time, unbounded vitality and a kind of unbelievable innocence I have met the same in a lion-cub, which my native servants in Africa brought me. I would not keep her, since I felt that it would in some way be wrong … I shall never forget the almost overpowering feeling of unconquerable strength and sweetness which she conveyed. I had all the wild nature of Africa amicably gazing at me with mighty playfulness. 

Here are what three other writers have said about her: 

"The book I was reading was this book I took out of the library by mistake. They gave me the wrong book, and I didn't notice it till I got  back to my room. They gave me Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen … What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. I wouldn't mind calling this Isak Dinesen up."

— Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye

• "Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair I like that."
• Raymond Carver in Writers at Work (1986) edited by George Plimpton

• "As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain nor to Henry James speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been  happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen."
• Ernest Hemingway as quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron