Excerpts from Judith Thurman's Biography of Isak DinesenBut as much as Tanne [Karen Blixon, aka Isak Dinesen] loved her brother and missed him when he was gone, his vagueness and solemnity got on her nerves. They often quarreled...and Tanne thought that Darwin for one, ought to have been burned at the stake for his "depressing" view of life. He called her a reactionary, and she countered that he was a Bolshevik. They disagreed about sexual morality - his point of view was wholesome and romantic; hers enlightened, in the eighteenth century sense of the word - and about birth control, which Tanne thought was radically practical but not esthetic. Thomas told her that considering her general outlook she ought to become a Catholic, and she responded that without subscribing to any dogma she was a sort of Catholic..."I think so often about those words in the Bible: 'I will not let thee go before thou blessest me.' I think there is such deep meaning, something so glorious in them. I almost take it to be my 'motto' in this life."
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If the feudal world of "Out of Africa" works so well, is so harmonious and beautiful, it is precisely because of its fixity. Love of fate is its central principle or, as Dinesen puts it, "pride..in the idea God had, when he made us." Its inhabitants take their places in the hierarchy according to the degree of pride they manifest, with the Africans - mystically forbearing and amused - at the top. The European aristocrats - the great atavisms like Denys, Berkeley and the narrator - defer to them, but just slightly and in the same spirit a gentleman feels himself to be morally inferior to a lady. Their fatalism is assertive; it is expressed as honor, and through it they have the privilege to understand tragedy. "If a man has a steadfast idea of honor," Dinesen told Curtis Cate, "he is absolutely safe as to what can happen to him."
Also found this
link on Dinesen's "Babette's Feast", which includes this snippet:
Like great moral deeds, artistic creation absorbs our entire energies. Preparing a great feast or singing an aria by Mozart removes us from the range of the ordinary and makes reentry, in the words of Walker Percy, an urgent human problem. Percy renames "reentry" what Kierkegaard calls the second movement, the return to the finite. After the great discharge of the all-consuming deed, how do we resume the ordinary tasks of life without scorn for the smallness at hand? In Lost in the Cosmos, Percy seems to assume that faith’s trek back to the finite is no longer much of an option. His account of the modern alternatives to faith is bleak indeed.
And in a stroke of luck, you can now Amazon search inside Flannery O'Connor's "The Habit of Being". And I found these references to Dinesen. Unfortunately there's not much. In a letter in 1957: "All I have read of Isak Dinesen are the twelve Gothic Tales and some of them I like right much-the one where the old woman and the money change places - but I can't take much of her at one time." Later in 1964: "I'm still reading 'Out of Africa' by Isak Dinesen too."
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