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- Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea.
- He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol.
- The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.
- The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing services, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea.
- The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
- He was the only man out of us who still "followed the sea."
- ...and their home is always with them -- the ship; and so is their country -- the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
- "They were men enough to face the darkness."
- ...with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower...
- "They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force -- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others."
- "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a slightly different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."
- ...we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences.
- "Now, when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.'" (9-10)
- "I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go."
- "She glanced at me above the glasses. The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me. ...she threw them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She seemed to know all about them and about me, too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful."
- "In the street -- I don't know why -- a queer feeling came to me that I was an impostor."
- "The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam."
- "The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning."
- "...the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me."
- "He was a young man, lean, fear, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait."
- "A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. ...A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare."
- "I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope..."
- "They were dying slowly -- it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now -- nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom."
- "I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly."
- "...but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character."
- "...as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. There was no need to open the big shutter to see. It was hot there, too; big flies buzzed fiendishly, and did not sting, but stabbed."
- "...and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still treetops of the grove of death."
- "A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild -- __and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country."
- "I remembered the old doctor -- 'It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.' I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting."
- "His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an axe."
- "...I remember it, but I can't explain. It was unconscious, this smile was, though just after he had something it got intensified for an instant. It came at the end of his speeches like a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the commonest phrase appear absolutely inscrutable."
- "'Men who come out here should have no entrails.'"
- "Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw this situation, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighted. You would think they were praying to it."
- "...and the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again."
- "His little eyes glittered like mica discs -- with curiosity -- though he tried to keep up a bit of superciliousness."
- "...for in truth my body was full only of chills, and my head had nothing in it but that wretched steam..."
- "He talked precipitately, and I did not try to stop him."
- "The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver -- over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute..."
- "You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -- which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -- what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose."
- "It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream -- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams..." (-) He was silent for a while. (-) "...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence -- that which makes its truth, its meaning -- its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream -- alone...")
- "...my influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tinpot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expected enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit -- to find out what I could do. No, I don't like work. I rather laze about and think about all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work -- no man does -- but I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself. Your own reality -- for yourself, not for others -- what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means."
- "He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand..."
- "...and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence."
- "Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe."
- "Anything -- anything can be done in this country. That's what I say; nobody here, you understand, here, can endanger your position. And why? You stand the climate -- you outlast them all."
- "The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without bending a single blade."
- "...into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver."
- "The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine."
- "...you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once -- somewhere -- far away -- in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace."
- "...I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out..."
- "...hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, that grimy beetle crawled on -- which was just what you wanted it to do."
- "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there."
- "We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet."
- "The earth seemed unearthly."
- "The mind of man is capable of anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."
- "He must meet that truth with his own true stuff -- with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do."
- "He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he had been instructed..."
- "Not a very enthralling book, but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real."
- "I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe from trouble in this world."
- "To keep the eyes so long on one thing was too much for human patience. The manager displayed a beautiful resignation."
- "When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round you like something solid."
- "One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse. I had often 'a little fever,' or a little touch of other things -- the playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course."
- "No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one's soul -- than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true."
- "He was just the kind of man who would wish to preserve appearances. That was his restraint."
- "...the cries we had heard. They had not the fierce character boding immediate hostile intention. Unexpected, wild, and violent as they had been, they had given me an irresistible impression of sorrow. (...) The danger, if any, I expounded, was from our proximity to a great human passion let loose."
- "Keep a lookout? Well, you may guess I watched the fog for the signs of lifting as a cat watches a mouse; but for anything else our eyes were of no more use to us than if we had been buried miles deep in a heap of cotton-wool. It felt like it, too -- choking, warm, stifling."
- "...a chain of shallow patches stretching down the middle of the river. They were discoloured, just awash, and the whole lot was seen just under the water, exactly as a man's backbone is seen sunning down the middle of his back under the skin."
- "I saw vague forms of men running bent double, leaping, gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent."
- "I declare it looked as though he would presently put to us some question in an understandable language; but he died without uttering a sound, without moving a limb, without twitching a muscle. Only in the very last moment, as though in response to some sign we could not see, to some whisper we could not hear, he frowned heavily, and that frown gave to his black death-mask an inconceivably sombre, brooding, and menacing expression. The lustre of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness."
- "There was a sense of extreme disappointment, as though I had found out I had been striving after something altogether without a substance."
- "...and my sorrow had such a startling extravagance of emotion even as such as I had noticed in the sorrow of these savages in the bush. I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life..."
- There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow's lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match went out.
- "Everything belonged to him -- but that was a trifle. The thing as to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own."
- "But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too. By Jove! -- breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in -- your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that's difficult enough."
- "He had no restraint, no restraint -- just like Kurtz -- a tree swayed by the wind."
- "...chattering at each other like a flock of excited magpies, and there was a scandalized murmur at my heartless promptitude."
- "...and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless, boyish face, very fair, with no features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance like sunshine and shadow on a wind-swept plain."
- "...and becoming gloomy all of a sudden. His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next."
- "'But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.'"
- "...staring at me with his little blue eyes that were perfectly round."
- "I was seduced into something like admiration -- like envy."
- "If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have consumed all thought of self so completely..."
- "I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness."
- "...and there it was, black dried, sunken, with closed eyelids -- a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber."
- "...there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him -- some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence."
- "I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude -- and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core."
- "I saw him open his mouth wide -- it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as thought he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him."
- "She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul."
- "Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect, of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve."
- "Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky..."
- "It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile..."
- "...it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice."
- "And I remember I confounded the beat of the drum with the beating of my heart, and was pleased at its calm regularity."
- "The night was very clear; a dark blue space, sparkling with dew and starlight in which black things stood very still."
- "He rose, unsteady, long, pale, like a vapor exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent before me; while at my back the fires loomed between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the forest."
- "There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! He had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air."
- "He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself."
- "And yet I had only supported him, his bony arm clasped round my neck -- and he was not much heavier than a child."
- "...they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language..."
- "The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz's life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing, out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time."
- "...both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate..."
- "...this grimy fragment of another world..."
- "'Live rightly, die, die...'"
- "His was an impenetrable darkness."
- "I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror -- of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision -- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: 'The horror! The horror!'"
- "A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces."
- "The voice was gone. What else had been there?"
- "Destiny. My destiny. Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be."
- "I noticed she was not very young -- I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, 'I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.'"
- "I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold."
- "And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink."
- "...she went on, and the sound of her voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard -- the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind, the murmurs of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness."
- "She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in a glimmer of gold."
- "I shall see this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her, too, a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said suddenly very low, 'He died as he lived.'"
jul 8 2020 ∞
jul 8 2020 +
jul 8 2020 +