Saturday 23 February 2019

In the dark of the heart


"They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience." 

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Under Western Eyes (1911)

"Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow [...] In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt [...] There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that [...] is always but a vain and fleeting appearance [...] A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains – but a clod of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing."

 Letter to Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (January 14th, 1898).

"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 grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, 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."

Heart of Darkness (1902)
 

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