Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad

For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long.

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.

He made a point of that. ‘But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.’

And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

“She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve.

Can one, in real life, actually discern so much from just looking at them?

He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct, like a vapour exhaled by the earth,

I tried to break the spell—the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions.

I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets.