Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 45: Source?: "I try to make it worse...."

Q. I have been searching for the line from the movie, Out of Africa, where Meryl Streep as Karen expresses things are going so poorly, and yet undefeated, she says, "I have this thing I do--and it goes on to say, when things get bad she imagines them even worse and holds that feeling until she can't take it any longer.

A. "I've got this little thing I've learned to do just lately...When it's so hard I think I shan't go on, I try to make it worse. I make myself think about Berkeley. Our camp on the river. How good it was. When I'm certain I won't stand it, I go a moment more. Then I know I can bear anything."

The line was written by the screenwriter, Kurt Luedtke.
Reference: Out of Africa: The Shooting Script. Kurt Luedtke, p. 145. New York: Newmarket Press, Compilation Copyright 1987.

Compare:
Nietzsche: "I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain and torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage" (The Will to Power(1888).

(Karen Blixen nowhere mentions Nietzsche in her Letters from Africa. However, her writing suggests that his philosophy did influence her stories. She mentions Nietzsche in "On Mottoes of My Life" (1960) (Daguerreotypes. Isak Dinesen, p. 14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.)

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