Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"
" 'Mistah Kurtz-he dead.'
"All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my
dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not
eat much. There was a lamp in there - light, don't you know-and outside
it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man
who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this
earth. The voice was gone, What else had been there? But I am of course
aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole.
"And then they very nearly buried me.
"However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did
not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my
loyalty to Kurtz once more. 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 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. I was within a hair's- breadth of the last opportunity for
pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have
nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a
remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped
over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that
could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace
the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that
beat in the darkness. He had summed up-he had judged. 'The horror!' He
was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of
belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of
revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth-the
strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I
remember best-a vision of grayness without form filled with physical
pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things-even of
this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived
through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the
edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And
perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all
truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable
moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.
Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of
careless contempt. Better his cry- much better. It was an affirmation, a
moral victory paid for by innumerable satisfactions. But it was a
victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and
even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own
voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a
soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.
Books RSS
