| Coulsong
Your Questions
Question 128: Source of:
Isak Dinesen on hunting as a love affair?
Q. Somewhere Isak Dinesen talks
about
hunting as if it were a kind of love affair with the game. Do you know
where I can find this in her writing?
A.
"The person
who can take delight in a sweet tune without wanting to
learn it, in a beautiful woman without wanting to possess her, or in a
magnificent head of game without wanting to shoot it, has not got a
human heart."--Shadows
on
the Grass (p. 439, New
York: Vintage Books,
1985)
Also:
"Hunting is
ever a love affair. The hunter is in love with the game, real hunters
are true animal lovers." (p. 440)
"The shot was a
declaration of love. . . an affair
of perfect harmony, of deep, burning, mutual desire. . ."(p. 442).
But:
"When I first came out to Africa I could not live without
getting a fine specimen of each single kind of African game. In my last
ten years out there I did not fire a shot except in order to get meat
for my Natives. It became to me an unreasonable thing, indeed in itself
ugly or vulgar, for the sake of a few hours' excitement to put out a
life that belonged in the great landscape and had grown up in it for
ten or twenty, or--as in the case of buffaloes and elephants--for fifty
or a hundred years" (p. 443).
Copyright © 2008 by Linda
Donelson. All rights reserved. During the past quarter century, Linda Donelson has been the only
author writing about Karen Blixen for an international audience. Her
biography, Out of Isak Dinesen (1998), was the Number One Best-Selling Scandinavian / or related title at Amazon.com for five years.
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Supported misspellings:
karen blixon, karin, isaac, isak dineson, isak denison, dinison,
dinisen, denesen, dinnison, dennison, dinnisen, coolsong, donaldson