These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination... Rabindranath Tagore

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
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On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--from Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Heart of Darkness


Heart of Darkness (1899) - Joseph Conrad


Steaming blindly into the unknown

unknown jungles
unknown humanity
unknown heat
unknown pressures

but the greatest unknown
the greatest fear
the greatest horror

the shock

to meet

the unknown self


MY GOOD READS REVIEW
Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When cultural and social conventions slam up against the unknown in a past era of colonial drive and glory, some strange impressions emerge. Kurtz is the enigmatic adventurer in the heart of Africa who pounds the trail for the British ivory trade, but subconsciously, even unwillingly, finds the darkness in his soul. Marlow, the narrator, seeks the thrill of sailing away from 'sepulchral' London and, by chance, aligns with the intrepid, 'god-like' Kurtz. In the background, steamy African humanity seems to be scooped into a monochromatic pit of savagery, rather distasteful to 21st century norms. For some readers, this may be abhorrent. But times then were the times. This novel has become a mirror of late 19th century trends and attitudes. Accept the existence of those features, and the novel becomes a dark horror of a self-absorbed humanity. Kurtz and Marlow could almost be the slim hope that some see 'the truth'.

View all my reviews

MY AMAZON REVIEW
In the Pits of Dark Humanity
Getting to know the raw heartbeat of the soul is not for the faint-hearted. Kurtz, in colonial Africa, is an intrepid adventurer seeking ivory treasures. By chance, he is thrust into a spiralling freefall, a reluctant confrontation with his own inner darkness. Marlow, the narrator, (the Henry Morton Stanley of Dr Livingstone history), seeks the elusive, god-like? enigma that is Kurtz. The Kurtz he finds is unnervingly like the man Marlow realises is the man he himself is subconsciously becoming. Set in a rich tapestry of steamy jungles, waters and shifty sheds of an Africa on a precipice, this novella introduces 'the horror' of greedy, blind civilisation bent on invasive self-destruction.

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