First Words

Well my first words are: Heart of Darkness.

A sombre note to begin my first ever blog.

I just put the novella down and do not want to pick it up. I am Tiny Thinkers- I shudder to go through the 111 pages again.

Let me clarify at the beginning itself that I have some memory issues due to certain medication and it is difficult for me recall anything that is remotely uninteresting.

Having said that, I always make it a point to ask myself : did I miss something there?

I could not follow HOD at all- neither philosophically nor linguistically. It is an interesting fact that Joseph Conrad did not know English till adulthood and even till his last days, he spoke English with a lilt.

I found that apart from the hard 'ship' terms which I like collecting as a hobby - yawl (sail boat), barges, estuary, almost every sentence was abstruse and recondite. Obdurate as I am, I tried to persist but ultimately had to keep the pencil down and concentrate on the story.

The story is disappointing. It is a framed narrative and is a recollection of a voyage into the eponymous heart of darkeness & the noblesse oblige of the white man to the amorphous blackness - the black natives, their pagan culture, their foggy river. And it is about whiteness too- ivory trade and the brilliance of a civilised soul. It is about the contrast.

But I cannot seem to fathom the story at all and therefore leave the floor open to anyone who has read and understood the little book. Little as in Kurtz and Kline and not in any inferior way.

Ciao