Lord Jim

by Joseph Conrad

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

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

We want in so many different ways to be,” he began again. “This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He want to be so, and again he want to be so. . . .” He moved his hand up, then down. . . . “He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil — and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow — so fine as he can never be. . . . In a dream.

“And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?” He shook his head regretfully. “It seems to me that some would have been very fine — if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don’t know.” “Whether his were fine or not,” I said, “he knows of one which he certainly did not catch.” “Everybody knows of one or two like that,” said Stein; “and that is the trouble — the great trouble. . . .”

We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.

We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends — those whom we obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties, — even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice, — even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees — a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience.

There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.

The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered. He would never go home now. Not he. Never.

I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions — and safe — and profitable — and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone — and as short-lived, alas!’

they came together under the shadow of a life’s disaster, like knight and maiden meeting to exchange vows amongst haunted ruins.

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends,

“This is my limit, because nothing less will do.”

But what of the distance? Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life,