In an essay about Isak Dinesen, whose fiction was closely drawn from her life, Arendt writes:
Life may contain the “essence” (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the “elixir”; and eventually you may even be privileged to “make” something out of it “to compound the story.” But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat it as such it will only play its tricks on you.”
I must revisit Dinesen’s tales in light of the idea they are derived closely from her life. Beyond Out of Africa, I never suspected that. ( and thanks for that terrific Burroughs video).
Thnx for the comment, Howard. I read Arendt’s take on Dinesen in MEN IN DARK TIMES, a collection of essays that also discusses Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, Randall Jarrell, others too. The ones on Brecht and Benjamin alone make the collection worth reading. The essay about Dinesen was prompted by a biography of her that Arendt found unsatisfactory but nevertheless useful for contemplating what drove Dinesen to recount events of her life and, perhaps more important, to create a fictional world for which Arendt was hugely grateful. As to Burroughs, yes, that video is a mesmerizing piece of work. Apropos Arendt’s take on Dinesen, one of Burroughs’s lifelong themes, not incidentally, was that the world is created by imagining it.