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The rover conrad6/25/2023 ![]() I read three of those books Woolf names in the heady flush of my teenage enthusiasm for Conrad – but only because I had first read Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes and Victory. It is the earlier books – Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ – that we shall read in their entirety. ![]() We shall make expeditions into the later books and bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most of us untrodden. ![]() I also enjoy tutting over the confident and wonderfully inaccurate predictions in the conclusion: The thing that I notice most, sitting here in 21st-century piety, is the apparently snooty condescension of the opening Woolf calling Conrad “our guest”, as if he spent all those years in British literary society on sufferance. But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea.īut it isn’t those observations that stand out today. ![]()
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