Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Can this be true of work we choose as well as work that chooses us?

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence—but more generally takes the form of apathy.…

Is this true? Apathy seems more of a surrender, but perhaps the more extreme, the more we are apt to fight it.

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.

A dark, depressing outlook. How much of humanity has simply been a procession of events that never realizes a sense of purpose? How long, and for how many cultures, has purpose meant something? Or even the same thing?

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all 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.

That moment we may only know in retrospect, where one path merges into our defining one.