Whenever I have a chance to make a toast, I say one of two things: I either use the Italian toast “Cin-cin,” or I raise a glass and use this phrase from Housman’s Shropshire cycle of poems.
In the movie version of Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen’s character says those words in a memorable toast at the movie’s end, and I fell in love with it in that moment! I went home and looked up Housman's beautiful poems.
When Karen Blixen speaks this line in the movie, she’s reached the painful moment in the story when she’s lost everything she holds dear to her in the world, and life circumstances are forcing her to leave her beloved Africa behind, but the audience recognizes that she’s leaving with her dignity intact.
She drinks from a small glass in a men’s club that had early on in her arrival to Africa eschewed her, and so her final appearance there, at their invitation, is a quiet, poignant triumph for her.
I read Thurman’s biography of Dinesen and knew how much she really did love that wild, untamed country, and her move back to Denmark, where she ended her life, was a difficult one for her. Her words, used in the film, speak volumes:
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
Apparently, they will...
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