Dinesen's "Out of "Africa"

In psychoanalyzing Dinesen’s passages, the reader sees that she was drawn to the opposite environment from that in which she grew up. She writes, “There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.” The words “no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere” reveals how bare everything was and broken down into the base aspects of everything. Nothing was in excess, everything was just the amount it had to be in order to survive. It also shows the simplicity of her environment. Instead of numerous ecosystems squished together on one island, like with England, it’s spread out across a giant continent. Only what is required to survive, and that simplicity has its own beauty despite how dry and barren it is in most areas.

Dinesen characterizes Africa as being high up with no luxuriance during the day while being limpid, restful and cold during the night. She uses words like strong and refined to describe the landscape, including dry and burnt like pottery. But despite that she talks of trees having light, delicate foliage that gave them “a heroic and romantic air like fullrigged ships with their sales clewed up...” The entire description, while conveying the dry heat that would be dangerous if underestimated, also seems to have a Romantic air. She romanticizes everything, which was common when those areas were colonized by those of the ruling class. And even though she lived and admired her environment, she was still separated from it and only seemed to hunt in it or manage a farm, both being acts of domination. Most of the description was “pleasant to think of when times were dull on the farm.” The landscape and the animals seemed to be “out there still, in their own country,” but the Dinesen never seemed to be part of it, at least in the excerpt. This compounds the concept of a lost world because not only was Africa "discovered" in order to colonize it, but what she's describing may no longer be there right where she said it is. General descriptions would be, but they'd be slightly altered because of time. This adds a magical quality to her descriptions because she's taking us back in time to when these descriptions were relevent, especially when she says things like, "... a landscape that had not its like in all the world."

The use of second person allows the readers to better place themselves in the environment, as if they were seeing it directly. If Dinesen used first person, it would detach the reader as well as the author instead of immersing the reader in it. The author is detached enough to begin with, she had to use some technique to draw the reader in aside from her descriptions. It's almost like telling a story to someone, but formally because of the rest of Dinesen's language. Also, I think second person may be a general "you" in this case. Like, "If you went there, you would see..." even if she wasn't talking to anybody in particular, just anyone who happened to be reading her words.