Joseph Conrad
Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a veranda draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled with fiery cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the very first word uttered Marlows body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.
(From Lord Jim)
It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a
vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation,
that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of
struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of
the very essence of dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey
the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its
truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We
live, as we dream-alone...
(From Heart of Darkness)
No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time
which I remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some
inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back
in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the
streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous
cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly
dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge
of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not
possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of
commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety,
was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a
danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten
them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their
faces, so full of stupid importance. I dare say I was not very well at that
time. I tottered about the streetsthere were various affairs to
settlegrinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons. I admit my behavior
was inexcusable, but then my temperature was seldom normal in these days.
(From Heart of Darkness)
It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil enough--it is said--to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera.
(From Nostromo)
At night the body of clouds advancing higher up the sky smothers the whole quiet gulf below with an impenetrable darkness, in which the sound of the falling showers can be heard beginning and ceasing abruptly--now here, now there. Indeed, these cloudy nights are proverbial with the seamen along the whole west coast of a great continent. Sky, land, and sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido--as the saying is--goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God Himself--they add with grim profanity--could not find out what work a man's hand is doing in there; and you would be free to call the devil to your aid with impunity if even his malice were not defeated by such a blind darkness.
(From Nostromo)
the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely
region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the
terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that
part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is
necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities
His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirringand sooner
forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever ... the artist appeals to that part
of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift
and not an acquisitionand, therefore, more permanently enduring.
(From The Nigger of the Narcissus)
