I am allowing myself One Book this summer– one book that falls outside of my list of MustReads (and that list is long, as I have a thesis for which I must be doing research, and also a certain Joseph and His Brothers which warrants some Serious Revisiting, and also a List Of Books that I must re-read and be prepared to teach come autumn, or late August, or whichever comes first).
I am allowing myself to read Out of Africa, the novel that incited the film of the same title and that introduced me to what Africa and Kenya might actually be like.
Yes, I myself have now come Out of Africa, and I thought I would indulge my memories of Kenya with Isak Dinesen’s telling of her time there. I am not very far in, but already am Very Pleased with her language and description. Already I have dog-eared many and many of the pages, and I have also begun a vocabulary list.
I love reading Really Good Books.
This passage in particular held me today. She describes her efforts at “doctoring” the Kikuyu people who lived on her farm: they would come to the porch of her house with their various ailments, and she would try whatever remedies she knew or could guess at.
What struck me in this passage is the faith of the people in question. For the author was not a successful doctor. She says, “I knew very little doctoring, just what you learn at a first aid course. But my renown as a doctor had been spread by a few chance lucky cures, and had not been decreased by the catastrophic mistakes that I had made.”
She goes on to relate a faith that, in my experience, reveres God with perhaps a more True and more Fearful (in the biblical sense) honesty than I am accustomed to seeing in the West, but it is one that resonates deeply with me. Here it is. See if you like it:
If now I had been able to guarantee my patients a recovery in each single case, who knows but that their circle might have thinned out? I should then have attained a professional prestige,– here evidently was a highly effective doctor from Volaia,– but would they still have been sure that the Lord was with me? For of the Lord they knew from the great years of drought, from the lions on the plains at night, and the leopards near the houses when the children were alone there, and from the swarms of grasshoppers that would come on to the land, nobody knew where-from, and leave not a leaf of grass where they had passed. They knew Him, too, from the unbelievable hours of happiness when the swarm passed over the maizefield and did not settle, or when in Spring the rains would come early and plentiful, and make all the fields and plains flower and give rich crops. So that this highly capable doctor from Volaia might be after all a sort of outsider where the real great things in life were concerned.
—Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
