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His brow and cheeks were square, his nose straight, and his complexion smooth.
Played by Guy Pearce
the seam down the middle of the billiard table, which had been sawn in two on the Sydney docks to better survive the crossing;
sailed for Victoria—a new strike, a new uncharted land—
I wonder what part of vic
The performance—Sensations from the Orient!—was a new act,
This all reminds me of Victory by Conrad. European men move to an exotic land for mining, and are ill-suited for the task or environment. The strangers have met at a bar at a hotel. The concert is like the travelling show in which Lena is trapped
“I beg to reserve my privacy.
Good phrase
The Crown Hotel was lately built, and still retained the dusty, honeyed trace of fresh-planed lumber, the walls still beading gems of sap along each groove, the hearths still clean of ash and staining. Moody’s room was furnished very approximately, as in a pantomime where a large and lavish household is conjured by a single chair.
Love this. The beads of sap between the boards aand the pantomime chair conjure something hastily knocked together, ramshackle.
my overall impressio of this place is that its dark brown and dimly lit by lamps
and he disliked reading in the dusk.
Hes fussy and anxious
“I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular,” he said. “I have endured a difficult journey, that is all, and I am very tired.” Behind him one of the billiard players made a shot: a doubled crack, a velvet plop, a ripple of appreciation from the other players. The clergyman shook out his paper noisily; another man coughed; another struck the dust from his shirtsleeve, and shifted in his chair.
It seems like theyre all giving Balfour a cue to get rid of him
though somewhat bitterly,
Geez what a mess
Moody gave an awkward dry cough. “I secured for her a small living—employment, you understand.
This is the part that she wasnt happy about, and maybe Moody doesnt care. This is a pretty neat but insensitive solutuon. He is looking after himself only. And it sounds shed have to drop her hypochondria to work a job
perceiving that the other was disappointed,
“None, sir,” Moody told him, for the third time that evening.
Are they thinking about killing him? Checking that he has no one?
(Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. This realization, when it came, surprised him.)
highborn woman put to work
It was charming to him, that such changes in fortune might be counted as tragedies—that the young man might confess them, with the stern, controlled embarrassment of a man who had been taught to believe, from the moment of his birth, that his estate would never change.
vanguard of the civilized world! Hokitika was growing faster than San Francisco, the papers said, and out of nothing…out of the ancient rotting life of the jungle…out of the tidal marshes and the shifting gullies and the fog…out of sly waters, rich in ore. Here the men were not self-made; they were self-making, as they squatted in the dirt to wash it clean.
This, of course, was a verdict that said less about the prisoner than about the judge.
the soul’s dark nights,
Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy.
nothing caused his spirits to lift more surely than the promise of a tale.
Moody
Played by Paul Schultz, haha
“He killed his own child.”
Gascoign is a gossip
the fog that pooled white in the valleys
Balfour & Harnett became Balfour Shipping, Balfour bought an embroidered vest and a derby hat, and around him the town of Hokitika began to rise.
reflects his skin-deep nature
Lauderback was wearing a woolen suit of the lightest fawn, a hue that took moisture badly.
salt cellar
every piece of meat in this town is salt or smoked:
Yum
In which remark the shipping agent showed his uncharitable bias,
I like it when the narrator jumps in to add information
“Welfare is the very proof of civilization—it is its finest proof, indeed!
These two are ill matched. Bfour is short sighted, Lauderback is thr opposite. Lauderback has comlassion and isnt self centered
The two men were as satellites to Lauderback.
A trio with a strange dynamic, like in Conrad's Victory
the whore in the road.
Lol... Wht a way to refer to someone
He saw that Balfour had offered friendship, and he had taken only assistance; that Balfour had offered kindness, and he had taken only the benefit of use.
“Round here, everybody’s always talking about home,” said Balfour. “Can’t help but think that the pleasure’s in the missing.”
“He told me I’d been marked as his mate. As
Why is lauderback even telling balfour this story? He doesnt trust him, like him, or think he is intelkigent. Is he telling balfour a fictitious story that he would like to see get spread around?
I thought about that d—ned twinkle until my heart near gave out.
He sounds very guilty of something
fo’c’sle,
and was scornful—and then his scorn gave way to mistrust, and his mistrust to perspicacity.
Thomas Balfour’s heart was beating very fast. He was unused to the awful compression that comes after a lie, when it dawns upon the liar that the lie he has uttered is one to which he is now bound; that he must now keep lying, and compound smaller lies upon the first, and be shuttered in lonely contemplation of his own mistake.
How awfully true
Spend a night at the theater.
Because of covid, i read things like this and think "why are they taking such a risk?"
munching on a slab of bread-and-dripping,
“Lucky to have you,” the clergyman said,
I do not like the sound of this guy. Hes a crawler
“You were talking very loud.”
This poor use of the english language might reflrct lack of education or breeding
Virtue,
Symbolic ship name
gaol’s governor, George Shepard,
Symbolic name, suggests that the town would be better off with a gaoler than a priest
and the expectation of a Catholic sensibility from his fellow Irish;
there is something that doesnt add up about devlin. Is he on the run?
name sounds a lot like 'deviling' or 'devil'
in a state of constant visualization, conjuring in his mind the untroubled future self he had determined that he would one day become.
contemporary
there was no conflict, in Cowell Devlin’s mind, between reality as he wished to perceive it, and reality as it was otherwise perceived.
dangerous leader. False prophet
he wanted very much to kneel and touch the woman, and check her body for signs of harm: he was greatly saddened by the notion of suicide, and considered it the most dreadful assault upon the soul that anybody could possibly make.
He has some compassion
