On Joseph Conrad, and Nostromo

"Conrad, like Flaubert, from whom he learned so much...was simply a disillusioned humane liberal who hated the established order but saw the futility -- and pathos -- of revolution."

"Few writers have paid so dearly for their achievements: Conrad's egocentricity never brought him the least happiness; it is sadly instructive that it was necessary to him."

On the character Charles Gould: "Gould is early shown, in a very subtle passage, to have the sadistic and murderous impulse of dictators in his breast.  The 'breathing image' of his father, now dead, is said to be no longer in Gould's power:

This consideration, closely affecting his own identity, filled his breast with a mournful and angry desire for action...Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.

"Gould's identity had been built on his psychic antagonism to his father...Dying, Mr. Gould upset the equilibrium of his son's personality."  Gould could have been a "truly enlightened man, a liberator, instead of which he is simply a corrupt colonialist...Gould acts in a familiar Western pattern: that of imposing 'idea' on what seems to him to be chaos."

On Conrad's construction, paradise of snakes: "The implication of the beautifully paradoxical phrase 'paradise of snakes' is that it is human interpretation of the 'knowledge' imparted by the snake that is wrong, not the knowledge itself."

On Conrad's profound pessimism: "man is bound to fall, because he brings a power-seeking curiosity to natural knowledge, so that he corrupts it."

Decoud uses the silver mine to keep himself "swallowed up in the immense indifference of things."

Quote: "A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane...may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved head?"  [Me: something M__ took to heart.]

Decoud is "the intellectual, turned false mystic by fear, only half defeated."

A Flaubertian liberal is "a disillusioned liberal who puts imagination above political philosophy."

Conrad was a "true pathological depressive...[who] needed, for his successful creativity, to be ill, broke and in a state of despairing self-hatred."

Conrad himself:
"The first hint of Nostromo came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable detail."

"Nostromo, a fellow in a thousand..."

"Though he disliked priests...he believed in God."

"Too many kings and emperors flourished yet in the world which God had meant for the people."

"...the indifference of a man of affairs to nature, whose hostility can always be overcome by the resources of finance..."

"In the transparent air of the high altitudes everything seemed very near, steeped in a clear stillness as in an imponderable liquid..."

"She dispensed them with simplicity and charm because she was guided by an alert perception of values.  She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists of delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension."

"But to be robbed under the forms of legality and business was intolerable to his imagination."

'"Charles Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches.  He simply went on acting and thinking in her sight.  This is the true method of sincerity."

"He was in his talks with her the most anxious and deferential of dictators, an attitude that pleased her immensely.  It affirmed her power without detracting from his dignity."

"It was imperative sometimes to know how to disobey the wishes of the dead."

"A woman with a masculine mind is not a being of superior efficiency; she is simply a phenomenon of imperfect differentiation -- interestingly barren and without importance...She could converse charmingly, but she was not talkative.  The wisdom of the heart having no concern with the erection or demolition of theories any more than with the defence of prejudices, has no random words at its command."

"The parrot, catching the sound of a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere.  Parrots are very human."