Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, is my guide & constant inspiration. From the 1956 Paris Review, after she was asked: most of your tales are laid in the last century, aren't they? You never write about modern times.
"I do, if you consider that the time of our grandparents, that just-out-of-reach time, is so much a part of us. We absorb so much without being aware. Also, I write about characters, and they take over. They make the design, I simply permit them their liberty. Now, in modern life and in modern fiction there is a kind of atmosphere and above all an interior movement inside the characters - which is something else again. I feel that in life and in art people have drawn a little apart in this century. Solitude is now the universal theme. But I write about characters within a design, how they act upon one another. Relation with others is important to me, you see, friendship is precious to me, and I have been blessed with heroic friendships. But time in my tales is flexible. I may begin in the eighteenth century and come right up to World War I. Those times have been sorted out, they are clearly visible. Besides, so many novels that we think are contemporary in subject with their date of publication - think of Dickens or Faulkner or Tolstoy or Turgenev, are really set in an earlier period, a generation or so back. The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquility...I was a painter before I was a writer....and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes."
"I do, if you consider that the time of our grandparents, that just-out-of-reach time, is so much a part of us. We absorb so much without being aware. Also, I write about characters, and they take over. They make the design, I simply permit them their liberty. Now, in modern life and in modern fiction there is a kind of atmosphere and above all an interior movement inside the characters - which is something else again. I feel that in life and in art people have drawn a little apart in this century. Solitude is now the universal theme. But I write about characters within a design, how they act upon one another. Relation with others is important to me, you see, friendship is precious to me, and I have been blessed with heroic friendships. But time in my tales is flexible. I may begin in the eighteenth century and come right up to World War I. Those times have been sorted out, they are clearly visible. Besides, so many novels that we think are contemporary in subject with their date of publication - think of Dickens or Faulkner or Tolstoy or Turgenev, are really set in an earlier period, a generation or so back. The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquility...I was a painter before I was a writer....and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes."
photo by Peter Beard.
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