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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: "I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes.
But I didn't believe them at first--the thing seemed so impossible.
The fact is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright,
pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape
of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering was--
how shall I define it?--the moral shock I received,
as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought
and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.
This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then
the usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility
of a sudden onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind,
Heart of Darkness |
