““At last disgusted by war and its killing fields, Wilhelm Dinesen fled to America, where he lived alone in a log cabin in the deep woods outside Oshkosh, Wisconsin. There he became a friend of the Chippewa and the Fox and Sauk Indians. He came to admire their grave dignity and “natural arrogance,” their unquestioning submission to elemental things, to landscape and weather and the vagaries of fate. Years later back in Denmark, disillusioned and stricken with syphilis, he hanged himself from the rafters of his apartment not far from the national legislature. He had become a politician; disillusioned with politics, he married and fathered five children—his favorite, Tanne, was ten when he killed himself—but he had never been able to settle down. A congenital restlessness led him inexorably to his death as it has led to the premature deaths of many other similar types: from Clive of India to Lord Byron and General Eaton, hero of the Barbary Wars, to Jim Morrison of the Doors. Tanne””
