Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
The line about loving what you kill seems to me to be a pretty common literary trope; I'd guess it's how people justified the indefensible. I'm reminded of a quote by Isak Dinesen that I couldn't track down, something along the lines of, "To see a lion and not want to kill it...." Of course that was entirely indefensible, unlike a peasant fisherman who fishes to live.
And in one of those synchronicities, it was Dinesen who Hemingway said should have won the Nobel instead of him.
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I didn't find a quote exactly like you began, but did find this about
Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen).
Quote:
She doesn't like to use his gun; it's too big. But, she says, the shot is for love, so shouldn't it use the largest caliber weapon?
[...]
But when Karen Blixen tells the story, the love is unquestionably for the lion. Hunting, she insists, is like a love affair. Usually, she admits, the passion is one-sided. The hunter is in love; the prey, not so much. But with lions, she insists, it's different: they want to kill her as much as she wants to shoot them.
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I must admit that I find this use of "love" suggests a looseness in the writing or dialogue, akin to saying "I love ice-cream", or a having a womaniser explain himself as "I love women". While there is certainly a dictionary sense in which this is the correct use of the word, the hunting context is such that the word never feels appropriate to me. I do know something of the intensity of feeling that can arise while hunting or fishing, but to describe it as "love" is (I think) misleading.