Notes on "Heart of Darkness"

First of, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a good book. I like it.

It was a bit difficult to read because of Conrad’s style, but I don’t hold it against him, or the book. It’s better for it.

I will skip the summary, and just share some of my observations, and notes.

Also, obviously – spoilers ahead.

What ideas??

Marlow keeps saying how everyone else talked about Kurtz’s ideas, how Kurtz himself talked about his ideas, his ideas, his ideas… ideas…

What bloody ideas? I get it that we are maybe not supposed to know the full extent of his ideas, that it’s intentional that way, but honestly I think it’s not even that.

Times have changed.

Today is much different than, say, one hundred years ago.

We get a couple of glimpses of these fabled ideas of Kurtz, and they’re… what? That a white man, with his might, and ships, and guns, and technology, must appear as a supernatural being to those men there living as if in the First Age, in the primeval forests.

I get that it’s kind of stupid to be annoyed by the differences between two times, and to judge people of one time by the standard of another time. I get that it’s sort of silly to say that ancient Greeks were a morally corrupt society because they kept slaves, or that the medieval kingdoms were morally corrupt because they did not use democracy (it wasn’t invented yet!), and many of today’s moral goods we take for granted.

But man, today, every bozo with a blog has I D E A S.

Go on Substack and you’ll read numerous accounts from bloggers left and right, extreme and moderate, earnest and shitposting, that are of the caliber of Kurtz’s ideas, or even more… that.

I’m one such bozo! Everyone has ideas!

I don’t know if we’re living in genuinely different times or what, but that constant dick-glazing from everyone, including partially from Marlow, towards Kurtz is totally bizarre.

Ok but Kurtz wasn’t really a person

OK, maybe he was an allegory, not an actual person but an embodiment – a personification – of colonialism.

I’m ok with this interpretation, it’s not like there’s anything correct here, l’auteur est mort, but still, even as a figure, I can’t help but see the stark difference between the irreverent times of today and the glazing of yore. If Kurtz wrote his little memo intended for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, and posted it today, he’d get fifty counter-essays of roughly the same caliber within a week.

The Great Man theory probably has some value

It’s the spirit of that time I think.

Today it’s more cynical, more averaged, more collectivist, more liberal.

There’s a sense of recognition of the masses, of the immense small steps that make up the large strides that a society makes, versus the idea of one man pushing society by himself.

I think it’s probably roughly correct!

But again, the disappearance of classical arts and classical education and classical norms and classical thought may have been a bit… too much. Everything is by committee today. Most of all, the skills taught to young men and women are, well, ok, and I guess appropriate for the times, but I cannot help but feel that we have lost something that was expressed by the admiration of others towards Kurtz.

Oratory.

Speaking, and being heard, and moving people with one’s speech, is not really that valued.

Again, everything is by the committee and of the committee, everything is ritualized.

It’s a great checks-and-balances system that prevents you from being led into a holy war, but sometimes society could use a bit of Muad’Dib; sometimes you should speak over the rituals imposed by the elders and make your voice heard to all the sietches, and to hell the customs.

Well I don’t know. I think it’s valuable. And I think we’ve lost it a bit.

Marlow’s ramblings

Marlow speaks and thinks – that is, Conrad writes – in such a weird and convoluted way.

It’s difficult to pinpoint what he actually means. Like, what are you trying to say my man?

But it’s not completely schizophrenic, it has structure, it has thought, and it’s really… poetic. Musical. Rhythmic.

If Marlow were an LLM, he’d have a pretty high temperature setting. It’s very difficult to predict the next sequence of tokens.

And given how much I am forced to read slop these days, it was a welcome rest (and exercise) for my mind, to read something of a more human, if slightly mad, mind-process.

Civilization is a thin veneer

Ultimately to the meat of the book: you come to the Congo, and all your ideas and idealism are stripped away almost immediately; immediately you start raiding and pillaging and killing and so on.

Today this is not news; we are very aware of how societies of south have suffered at the hands of the societies of north.

I guess they were really surprised by this at that time? Though I don’t know how.

It’s roughly the same period when von Clausewitz published his ruminations On War, where he pretty openly says that there’s no such thing as international law, and it’s just force and overpowering and submitting your enemy.

But anyway, civilization is a thin veneer, easily stripped away by the slightest of circumstances. It’s why zombie fiction is so popular these days. We no longer have “uncivilized” places on this Earth, or at least it is not popular to call them that, but you can have these things in fiction, and see how men and women transform in societies where the state has crumbled.

Civilization is a thin veneer and it’s probably why I have these prepper-like tendencies of mine; that and maybe some poverty-induced trauma.

Overall

…it’s a good book! I enjoyed it a lot.

I have this desire to visit Africa. I don’t know why.

Maybe if you’re a white European in your thirties, some gene activates inside you if you haven’t yet made your fortune, and forces you to migrate south to… I don’t know, build a railroad from South Africa to Egypt, or to start driving a truck and try to deliver some machinery to sanctioned Sudan while repairing your truck by shoving bananas in the axle. Or at least to cross the Congo jungle on bicycle.