Excerpts from
Letters from Africa 1914-31
By Karen Blixen
- Extract from a letter to Thomas Dinesen, 1 April 1926
I think it was a great misfortune for me to grow up and belong in the family, the milieu, the "outlook on life" into which I was born. You must realize that I say this without the least reproach towards any of them at home, and with no which to criticize except as much as one can criticize everything and anything - I donīt know of any better, nicer, sweeter people than everyone at home, it was just that they did not suit me. And their great unlimited goodness and love for me, all the kindness were merely so many more misfortunes. They made opposition impossible for me myself. -
In this atmosphere and this light, the weak attempts which I made to do so as a child and a young girl came to stand before me as the very deeds of darkness.
I will not say that I became unhappy as a result, but all my abilities were destroyed as a result of it, all possibility for me to come to live and act, to achieve something as myself, came to naught as a result. Now that I believe that I can see and judge the entire situation clearly, I feel an immeasurable debt to them all - or rather: to the special spirit, for a quite undeserved reservoir of love and forbearance, - but, on the other page of the balance sheet: with a claim on them, for that time of my life, childhood and youth, when I had the possibility of becoming something, especially becoming unfettered, independent of them - a possibility of which they robbed me, and which I cannot now see how I can make up for now.
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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