Out of Africa

A white man who wanted to say a pretty thing to you would write: “I can never forget you.” The African says: “We do not think of you, that you can ever forget us.”

We walked together from the one thing on the farm to the other, naming them as we passed them, one by one, as if we were taking mental stock of my loss, or as if Ingrid were, on my behalf, collecting material for a book of complaints to be laid before destiny.

I had seen him only a short time ago, standing bare-headed in the afternoon sun, gazing out over the land, and lifting his field-glasses to find out everything about it. He had taken in the country, and in his eyes and his mind it had been changed, marked by his own individuality, and made part of him. Now Africa received him, and would change him, and make him one with herself.

You must turn your mournful ditty
To a merry measure,
I will never come for pity,
I will come for pleasure.”

The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be a pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape.

Something within him makes him run away from the snake as from the devil, and that is what is called the voice of conscience

The man who can caress a snake can do anything

The wild animals, your Excellency, are perhaps a proof of the existence of God.

In other words, since we are all prisoners in life, are we happier, or more miserable, the more talents we possess?”

As to us, we shall have to find someone badly transgressing against us, before we can in decency ask the Giraffes to forgive us our transgressions against them.