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No eloquence could have been so withering to one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.
they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language;
Kurtz’s life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time.
slipped past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees looking patiently after this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings.
things I abominate, because I don’t get on with them.
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath— “‘The horror! The horror!’
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.
This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it.
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.
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.
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.
He could get himself to believe anything—anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.’
“I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man’s life,—a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage;
The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.
“‘Intimacy grows quick out there,’ I said. ‘I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another.’
soughing
His end,’ said I, with dull anger stirring in me, ‘was in every way worthy of his life.’
Such innuendo.
