#blixen

You know you are truly alive when you're living among lions.

To be so at one with one's own destiny that no one will be able to tell the dancer from the dance, that the answer to the question, Who are you? will be the Cardinal's answer, "Allow me ... to answer you in the classic manner, and to tell you a story," is the only aspiration worthy of the fact that life has been given us. This is also called pride, and the true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being"in love with {their} destiny" or whether they "accept as success what others warrant to be so ... at the quotation of the day. They tremble, with reason, before their fate.

- Isak Dinesen, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays

Although Karen Blixen sometimes wrote under a pseudonym, Isak Dinesen being her most frequent choice, she wrote Out of Africa as Karen Blixen. The book was her memory of the seventeen years she lived in Africa as coffee plantation owner Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke. For those years, Blixen’s role in life changed.

It began in late 1913 when the 28-year-old boarded a ship in Denmark. She arrived in Mombasa in January 1914, and married her betrothed, the Swedish Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, the very same day. The role of Baroness, landowner and plantation owner meant she was responsible for staff, harvests, finances, social activities, and more. These responsibilities became part of her purpose in life.

But very soon after her marriage, she was diagnosed with syphilis. Painful mercury treatments and surgeries followed. The plantation suffered bad harvests and financial problems. To deal with the peaks and troughs of her new role, Blixen turned to her writing. In Out of Africa, she wrote, “I began in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.”

By 1931 she had lost everything—marriage, hope of children, love, land, work, and money—and left Kenya to live with her widowed mother in Denmark. It was a particularly difficult time for her. Hannah explained that Blixen believed suffering to be part of life and refused to be consumed by it. Instead, she carried on exploring the connection of role and purpose in her writing. In 1933 she published Seven Gothic Tales under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, and in 1937 she published Out of Africa.

Role, purpose, fate, and destiny are intertwined in Blixen’s work. Babette, in Babette’s Feast (published in Anecdotes of Destiny, 1958), also uses her role to help others. Refusing to speak of past sorrow, she shrugs her shoulders and says “It is Fate.” Suffering brings her to the remote island, but through her role as cook she finds purpose in helping others. She brings them food, but also grace.

In Sorrow Acre (published in Winter’s Tales, 1942), Adam has difficulty understanding how people can accept their fate. He finally sums up Blixen’s attitude to life when he says “…so is man one with his destiny, and he shall love it as himself.”

Very old families will sometimes feel upon them the shadow of annihilation.

The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilised place.

You know you are truly alive when you're living among lions.