File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2001/heidegger.0103, message 88


From: "Gary C Moore" <gottlos75-AT-mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: The Heart of Darkness
Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 01:34:46 -0600


Dear Kenneth Johnson,
Just to let you know that I appreciated your quote from Conrad. There are a
number of things of his that I like intensely, but his short novels are
absolutely fantastic, and "The Heart of Darness" is one of the greatest
pieces of philosophy of all time. Have just come of the 'jungle' my self and
am even more fanatically "loyal to Kurtz" than before.

'Sincerely'

Gary C. Moore

----- Original Message -----
From: Kenneth Johnson <kenn-AT-beef.sparks.nv.us>
To: <heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 12:47 PM
Subject: The Heart of Darkness


>
>  "However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did
> not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my
> loyalty to Kurtz once more. 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. I have wrestled with death. It
> is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an
> impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without
> spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of
> victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid
> scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that
> of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a
> greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's
> breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with
> humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason
> why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He
> said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the
> meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was
> wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate
all
> the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up -- he had judged.
> 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression
> of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a
> vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a
> glimpsed truth -- the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is
not
> my own extremity I remember best -- a vision of greyness without form
> filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of
> all things -- even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I
seem
> to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped
> over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot.
> And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and
> all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable
> moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.
> Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of
> careless contempt. Better his cry -- much better. It was an affirmation, a
> moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by
> abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have
remained
> loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I
heard
> once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence
> thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.
>
>    "No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I
> remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some
> inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself
> back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through
> the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their
> infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their
> insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They
were
> intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence,
because
> I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.
>
> -k
>
>
>
> x
>
>
>
>
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