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It took me a little while to understand about deleting.
You can delete your own posts if/when a delete box ( an X) is apparent in the top right- hand corner. I think you are given the opportunity when you have just posted, but not later.
This explains why BT readers will occasionally get an empty posting by me-- the solution I found when I had changed my mind, too late: I withdraw the content, leaving only two random letters: not exactly neat, but not much harm done.
Has anybody found a better way of deleting when the box doesn't appear?
Not sure about Conrad's reason for giving the story such nightmare qualities, but as I reread it I also picked up his references to fever and perhaps mild delirium. By his state of mind, maybe he was less capable of seeing that landscape as anything but nightmarish. Of course, he was also under a fair amount of stress, not acting the part of the typical ecotourist!
Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 10:22 am Post subject: Great pictures!
Now I have to apologize for the length of this post. I found a passage in the book that I spontaneously came to think of when I saw the pictures of the river:
"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were
kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air
was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of
sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into
the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and
alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed
through a mob of wooded islands; 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 for
ever 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. It was the stillness of an implacable force
brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful
aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no
time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by
inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I
was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I
shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the
life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to
keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night
for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort,
to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality--the reality, I tell
you--fades. The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily. But I felt it
all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at
my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your
respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half-a-crown a tumble--"
When I read this passage again I could understand, in relation to the pictures, why Conrad was describing the river so depressingly. We watch the river and see something beautiful: untouched nature. But for Marlowe, stuck on that empty, quiet river, constantly threatened by the risk of getting stuck on shoals the nature is not something beautiful and positive. He is no tourist comfortably seated in an airconditioned bus. He feels like an intruder ready to be swallowed by the vast, anonymous jungle, drowned in the sluggish and shoal-ridden river or killed by anonymous "savages" lurking in the shadows (but seldom seen).
It's so easy with our modern outlook to forget how much of human history, even in Conrads time, that has consisted of a struggle against nature.
When I read this passage again I could understand, in relation to the pictures, why Conrad was describing the river so depressingly. We watch the river and see something beautiful: untouched nature. But for Marlowe, stuck on that empty, quiet river, constantly threatened by the risk of getting stuck on shoals the nature is not something beautiful and positive. He is no tourist comfortably seated in an airconditioned bus. He feels like an intruder ready to be swallowed by the vast, anonymous jungle, drowned in the sluggish and shoal-ridden river or killed by anonymous "savages" lurking in the shadows (but seldom seen).
It's so easy with our modern outlook to forget how much of human history, even in Conrads time, that has consisted of a struggle against nature.
Thanks for the excellent quotation and for your input Sansom-- it's true, especially in Europe there is no wilderness left-- I think of nature as places to go on (mainly signposted) walks between villages in France. Even in an part of France with no large cities like where I live "nature" is always close to agriculture.
I imagine it must be different in some parts of Sweden?
Oh, and Samson, seeing the quality of your postings, may I attract your attention to the discussion of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men
(in case you vanish for a few weeks and this is my one opportunity ) ?
Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 12:16 pm Post subject: I'm flattered
Is it different in Sweden? Yes and no. I guess we do have, together with Finland and Russia, more vast stretches of nature than in the rest of Europe, but a lot of it is industrial forest - planted trees in straight lines for use in the wood industry. And with cell phones and the wolves almost extinct there's not that same feeling as in The Heart of Darkness of a looming danger.
Also, I live in southern Sweden and have only once, as a kid, visited Norrland, the northern part (half the country) which is more of a wilderness.
) ?
