Because I Have Nothing to Say Today

I have no idea at all what to write about today. For the past week and a half that I’ve been keeping this blog, I always have something to write about. Now, I’ll probably be just blabbing nonsense.

Or maybe I can use this time to focus on my assignment. Believe it or not, I finally am reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (yeah, yeah, I’m that dreadful English major who breezed through college without reading “important” texts). The first few pages of the novel kept collapsing on me, and the only thing that propelled me to read further was imagining Apocalypse Now playing in my head. I had to visualize Brando as Kurtz (the horror, the horror, indeed). But I’m still trying to figure out on which character Robert Duvall’s crazy napalm-sniffing soldier was based.

But now that I’m in the middle of Conrad’s text, I find myself devouring it, loathing it, hypnotized by it. It shocks me the same way many conquest stories appall me, but the text’s flavor captivates me, too. I imagine it to be similar to Wells’s Time Machine, Burrough’s Tarzan, or Stevenson’s Treasure Island. There’s a pulp fiction quality to it, though Heart of Darkness somehow is (or wants to be) a more serious, sophisticated adventure book, analyses and monologue-as-criticisms eclipsing the action. Marlow is an odd character. A man dies by his feet, the victim’s blood soaks his shoes. Yet he stares at the dead man with an amazing detachment. He observes the world, functioning beyond fear and anger, as if he is a perfect being tut-tut-ing the failures and foibles of other men.

But he is also a storyteller, relating an event that has taken place in the past. Maybe it is time, having passed, that allows him his coolness, his detachment. The story is in the past, the adventurer tells it to us; despite the quality of excitement that Conrad delivers, we breathe easy, knowing Marlow is alive, sitting on a boat floating on the River Thames. We know then he has survived the harrowing journey.

Physically, at least. His cranium still needs measuring.

Stew on This:

There is only one rule in this house: no growing up.

Grandma Wendy
Hook (dir. Steven Spielberg)