Lord Jim

by Joseph Conrad

Jim’s father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions.

Indoctrination for unthinking people? As a minister, his approach should be consistent and unbiased regardless of socio-economic status! Perpetuating the idea that their low social status is justified or ordained by god stifling critical thinking and discouraging lower classes from questioning social hierarchy, reinforcing resignation or fatalism to their position in society, consistent with Marxist ideology critical of religion as a tool for maintaining social control and class hierarchies! The absolute truth of the word of god should be the same regardless of socio-economic status. The idea of absolute truth of the word of god is (in the real, rational world), relative and context based-- but should not need be if it were absolute. See: The Ruined Cottage by Wordsworth. Reinforcing existing social order.

and often from there he looked down, with the contempt of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude of roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and belching out smoke like a volcano.

There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and made him hold his breath in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.

The universe's destructive element? The universe is malevolent and intentional or indifferent?

Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had ministered to a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror. He felt angry with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares and checking unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes.

Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse of the earnestness in the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made apparent as people might think. There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary—the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.

Is the universe malevolent and intentional or indifferent?

The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dulness of exhausted emotion.

Imagination is called the "enemy of men" because it can torment us with frightening possibilities. Human thought is imperfect and vague when confronted with unseen dangers. The constant strain of fear and anxiety can drain our emotional resources. The psychology that Conrad writes about is profound.

They loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes—would have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough.

European colonialism. Officers in positions of superiority but dependent on those on deck.

A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propeller turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme of a safe universe; and on each side of the Patna two deep folds of water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within their straight and diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that, left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.

The moon a "slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold," symbolizing purity, value, and hope, the mere appearance of security.

At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead; and when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of the wake drawn as straight by the ship’s keel upon the sea as the black

The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations.

Gives a sense of timelessness and universality. The comparison of the ship to a "crowded planet" emphasizes its isolation and insignificance in the vastness of space. The phrase "appalling and calm solitudes" suggesting a sense of awe-inspiring emptiness and quietness. The image of the ship speeding through the darkness, awaiting the "breath of future creations," adds mystery and anticipation.

he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon that came like a gush from a sewer.

Said of Captain Gustav, of the SS Patna. Also, seems to represent current history.

Jim went on smiling at the retreating horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought was contemplating his own superiority.

I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations straight in the face—a readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without pose—a power of resistance, don’t you see, ungracious if you like, but priceless—an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive corruption of men—backed

backed by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas.

You may call it an unhealthy curiosity if you like; but I have a distinct notion I wished to find something. Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse.

the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct. It is the hardest thing to stumble against; it is the thing that breeds yelling panics and good little quiet villainies; it’s the true shadow of calamity.

my individuality, to push me away into the crowd. ‘The worst of it,’ he said, ‘is that all you fellows have no sense of dignity; you don’t think enough of what you are supposed to be.’

‘This is a disgrace. We’ve got all kinds amongst us—some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand?—trusted!

I became positive in my mind that the inquiry was a severe punishment to that Jim, and that his facing it—practically of his own free will—was a redeeming feature in his abominable case.

A single word had stripped him of his discretion—of that discretion which is more necessary to the decencies of our inner being than clothing is to the decorum of our body.

and the stars had been ironically unpropitious.

The universe is ultimately disinterested in human affairs.

but the power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the logic of their construction.

The power of rhetoric and how people can be swayed by words, regardless of their logical meaning or the truth.

The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog—bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country. They fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation. Upon the whole he was misleading.

Rents: literary term for "tears" or "openings". It's a metaphorical expression that evokes the idea of small, fleeting gaps or fissures in the fog.

it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

The human tendency to avoid confronting our own flaws, weaknesses. Self deception.

‘It is all in being ready. I wasn’t; not—not then. I don’t want to excuse myself; but I would like to explain—I would like somebody to understand—somebody—one person at least!

“It was solemn, and a little ridiculous too, as they always are, 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.

With every instant he was penetrating deeper into the impossible world of romantic achievements.

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last; the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life.

Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,—the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.”

Existential struggles.

He was not speaking to me, he was only speaking before me, in a dispute with an invisible personality, an antagonistic and inseparable partner of his existence—another possessor of his soul.

it was a subtle and momentous quarrel as to the true essence of life, and did not want a judge.

I was made to look at the convention that lurks in all truth and on the essential sincerity of falsehood. He appealed to all sides at once—to the side turned perpetually to the light of day, and to that side of us which, like the other hemisphere of the moon, exists stealthily in perpetual darkness, with only a fearful ashy light falling at times on the edge.

A moral dilemma. Truth, falsehood, and human nature. Canfalsehoods can be deeply ingrained and sincerely believed?

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness. When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. Of course, as with belief, thought, love, hate, conviction, or even the visual aspect of material things, there are as many shipwrecks as there are men, and in this one there was something abject which made the isolation more complete—there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke.

What is the nature of existence, and the impact of catastrophic events on human lives? Consider a shipwreck and an individual's world failing them.

‘Fort intrigués par ce cadavre,’

Very intrigued by this corpse.

Indeed this affair, I may notice in passing, had an extraordinary power of defying the shortness of memories and the length of time: it seemed to live, with a sort of uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their tongues. I’ve had the questionable pleasure of meeting it often, years afterwards, thousands of miles away, emerging from the remotest possible talk, coming to the surface of the most distant allusions.

All by chance.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much—everything—in a flash—before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.

Time had passed indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead. It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron-grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulder-straps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those uncounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental successes.

I made no difficulty in communicating to him what had interested me most in this affair.

Not the facts of the case, but Jim's perspective and inner character

‘That’s it. That is it.’ His chin seemed to sink lower on his breast, his body to weigh heavier on his seat. I was about to ask him what he meant, when a sort of preparatory tremor passed over his whole person, as a faint ripple may be seen upon stagnant water even before the wind is felt. ‘And so that poor young man ran away along with the others,’ he said, with grave tranquillity.

‘Ah! The young, the young,’ he said indulgently. ‘And after all, one does not die of it.’ ‘Die of what?’ I asked swiftly. ‘Of being afraid.’

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

But we never die of it.

‘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!’. . . He drank carelessly. . . . ‘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. Abominable funk (un trac épouvantable). And even for those who do not believe this truth there is fear all the same—the fear of themselves. Absolutely so. Trust me. Yes. Yes . . . At my age one knows what one is talking about—que diable!’. . . He had delivered himself of all this as immovably as though he had been the mouthpiece of abstract wisdom, but at this point he heightened the effect of detachment by beginning to twirl his thumbs slowly. ‘It’s evident—parbleu!’ he continued; ‘for, make up your mind as much as you like, even a simple headache or a fit of indigestion (un dérangement d’estomac) is enough to...

‘That is so,’ he resumed placidly. ‘Man is born a coward (L’homme est né poltron). It is a difficulty—parbleu! It would be too easy other vise. But habit—habit—necessity—do you see?—the eye of others—voilà. One puts up with it. And then the example of others who are no better than yourself, and yet make good countenance

‘Allow me . . . I contended that one may get on knowing very well that one’s courage does not come of itself (ne vient pas tout seul). There’s nothing much in that to get upset about. One truth the more ought not to make life impossible . . . But the honour—the honour, monsieur! . . . The honour . . . that is real—that is! And what life may be worth when’. . . he got on his feet with a ponderous impetuosity, as a startled ox might scramble up from the grass . . . ‘when the honour is gone—ah ça! par exemple—I can offer no opinion. I can offer no opinion—because—monsieur—I know nothing of it.’

There was no morality in the impulse which induced me to lay before him Brierly’s plan of evasion—I may call it—in all its primitive simplicity.

Suicide

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind, and from that point of view he was no mean traitor, but his execution was a hole-and-corner affair. There was no high scaffolding, no scarlet cloth (did they have scarlet cloth on Tower Hill? They should have had), no awe-stricken multitude to be horrified at his guilt and be moved to tears at his fate—no air of sombre retribution. There was, as I walked along, the clear sunshine, a brilliance too passionate to be consoling, the streets full of jumbled bits of colour like a damaged kaleidoscope: yellow, green, blue, dazzling white, the brown nudity of an undraped shoulder, a bullock-cart with a red canopy, a company of native infantry in a drab body with dark heads marching in dusty laced boots, a native policeman in a sombre uniform of scanty cut and belted in patent leather, who looked up at me with orientally pitiful eyes as though his migrating spirit were suffering exceedingly from that unforeseen—what d’ye call ’em?—avatar—incarnation.

Reference to the site of executions in London, and Jim's symbolic execution at trial.

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp. It was the fear of losing him that kept me silent, for it was borne upon me suddenly and with unaccountable force that should I let him slip away into the darkness I would never forgive myself.

I had a disturbing sense of being no help but rather an obstacle to some mysterious, inexplicable, impalpable striving of his wounded spirit.

I was no longer young enough to behold at every turn the magnificence that besets our insignificant footsteps in good and in evil. I smiled to think that, after all, it was yet he, of us two, who had the light. And I felt sad. A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.”

They were all equally tinged by a high-minded absurdity of intention which made their futility profound and touching.