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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina--
and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like.
Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,--precious little to eat fit for a
civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here,
no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness,
like a needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile,
and death--death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush.
They must have been dying like flies here. Oh, yes--he did it.
Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either,
except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps.
They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered
Heart of Darkness |
