I felt a relief then, as I watched the young soldiers marching west, to the frontier, for in a fight the adversaries become one, and the two duellists make up a Unity. When in 1940 I was in Berlin, engaged by three Scandinavian papers to write about Nazi Germany, woman–and the whole world of woman–was so emphatically subdued that I might indeed have been walking about in such a one-sexed community. An orchestra is a Unity, and may be perfect as such, but twenty double-basses striking up the same tune are Chaos.Ī community of but one sex would be a blind world. A quartet is a Unity because it is made up of dissimilar instruments. A number of perfectly similar objects do not make up a whole–a couple of cigarettes may quite well be three or nine. A right-hand glove with its contrast the left-hand glove makes up a whole, a pair of gloves but two right-hand gloves you throw away. A hook and an eye are a Unity, a fastening but with two hooks you can do nothing. Man and woman become one, a physically and spiritually creative Unity, by virtue of their dissimilarity. Two homogeneous units will never be capable of forming a whole, or their whole at its best will remain barren. In order to form and make up a Unity, in particular a creative Unity, the individual components must needs be of different nature, they should even be in a sense contrasts. Neither have I since then ridden or shot. And as I watched his dark immovable figure on the quay growing smaller and at last disappear, I felt it as if I were losing a part of myself, as if I were having my right hand set off, and from now on would never again ride a horse or shoot with a rifle, nor be able to write otherwise than with my left hand. Farah, by the time I had had to give up the farm and was leaving Africa, saw me off in Mombasa. I talked to him about my worries as about my successes, and he knew of all that I did or thought. For almost eighteen years he ran my house, my stables and safaris. Were any reader to object that I might choose a character of greater importance, I should answer him that that would not be possible.įarah came to meet me in Aden in 1913, before the First World War. As here, after twenty-five years, I again take up episodes of my life in Africa, one figure, straight, candid, and very fine to look at, stands as doorkeeper to all of them: my Somali servant Farah Aden.

Shadows on the grass isak dinesen