Lord Jim

by Joseph Conrad

And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly.

“All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.

Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew them here was purely psychological—the expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions. Naturally nothing of the kind could be disclosed.

but when I reflected that I was associated in these fatal disadvantages with twelve hundred millions of other more or less human beings, I found I could bear my share of his good-natured and contemptuous pity for the sake of something indefinite and attractive in the man.

his self-satisfaction presented to me and to the world a surface as hard as granite. He committed suicide very soon after.

The demeanour of one suggested gloomy impudence and of the other a contemptuous boredom; yet one attitude might not have been truer than the other, and I was aware that one was not true. Brierly was not bored—he was exasperated; and if so, then Jim might not have been impudent. According to my theory he was not. I

those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should

be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalties of its failure.

He might have been resigned to die but I suspect he wanted to die without added terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful trance.

Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person—this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest?

This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices.

Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion.

‘I meant business, but they meant noise only. Nothing happened.’

‘One is always afraid. One may talk, but . . .’ He put down the glass awkwardly . . . ‘The fear, the fear—look you—it is always there.’. .

‘Yes! yes! One talks, one talks; this is all very fine; but at the end of the reckoning one is no cleverer than the next man—and no more brave. Brave! This is always to be seen. I have rolled my hump (roulé ma bosse),’ he said, using the slang expression with imperturbable seriousness, ‘in all parts of the world; I have known brave men—famous ones! Allez!’.

. ‘Brave—you conceive—in the Service—one has got to be—the trade demands it (le métier veut ca). Is it not so?’ he appealed to me reasonably. ‘Eh bien! Each of them—I say each of them, if he were an honest man—bien entendu—would confess that there is a point—there is a point—for the best of us—there is somewhere a point when you let go everything (vous lachez tout). And you have got to live with that truth—do you see? Given a certain combination of circumstances, fear is sure to come.

To fling away your daily bread so as to get your hands free for a grapple with a ghost may be an act of prosaic heroism.

Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place?

tell you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough.

It seems impossible to believe that mere greed could hold men to such a steadfastness of purpose, to such a blind persistence in endeavour and sacrifice.

Dain Waris, the distinguished youth, was the first to believe in him; theirs was one of those strange, profound, rare friendships between brown and white, in which the very difference of race seems to draw two human beings closer by some mystic element of sympathy.

You take a different view of your actions when you come to understand, when you are made to understand every day that your existence is necessary—you see, absolutely necessary—to another person. I am made to feel that.

He had the gift of finding a special meaning in everything that happened to him.

‘Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others,’ he said after some hesitation.