When I’ve met people who have later become close friends, I have almost immediately known that they were somehow, underneath, like me. Which I take to mean that people who are in some sense fundamentally alike, not on the surface but underneath, recognize and respond to each other. They recognize each other without question.” “When two thieves meet, they need no introduction. The power, whether natural or supernatural, that creates our fates, that gives shape and purpose to our lives, that so often allows or does not allow us to set sail.Īnd the third and final quotation is as follows: In other words, all the political powers of the world can command, but they cannot countermand the power of nature itself, or of whatever power lies beyond nature. The next quotation I remember from my book is the following:
It was a more elegant way of saying to myself, “For goodness’s sake, just start.” I’ve used this motto several times in my life, to urge myself on to something when I was afraid that I would never actually succeed at it. It means, literally, “It is necessary to sail, it is not necessary to live.” Meaning, it is necessary to set off, even if you’re not at all sure that you’re ever going to arrive. The first one was from Dinesen, a motto that she chose for herself as a teenager, and it was this: “ Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.” Evidently, this is a quotation from Pompey, who used it to urge his sailors on when they refused to set sail on a stormy sea, to bring grain from Africa to Rome.
But there are three quotations from it that I remember distinctly. (Which was, I now realize, an activity popular in the nineteenth century, not so much in the twentieth.) I don’t have that book anymore, I don’t know what happened to it. When I was young, a teenager, I had a green book in which I wrote down memorable quotations. And one of my favorite essays is her “On Mottoes of My Life.” If you’ve read any interviews with me, you’ll know that one of my favorite writers is Isak Dinesen.
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