“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings. “The silent, all-embracing genius of consent” that is also the genius of true faith — the Hebrew Kadish, the death prayer said said by the closest relative, says nothing but “Holy is His Name”— rises out of the story because in the repetition of imagination the happenings have become what [Dinesen] would call a “destiny”. All her stories are actually “Anecdotes of Destiny”, they tell again and again how at the end we shall be privileged to judge.
-Hannah Arendt, ”Isak Dinesen”, Men in Dark Times
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