Joseph Conrad: An Outpost of Progress |
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Title: An Outpost of Progress |
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| Joseph Conrad, a Polish born seaman who later settled in England and became a well-know English author, was a keen storyteller. The following quotation ist taken from his short story "An Outpost of Progress" which treats a similar subject as Conrad`s book "The Heart of Darkness": the brooding spirit of the deep and dark interior of Africa. | ||||||
| The quotation describes two white employees of a colonial trading company. The two men are to staff a colonial outpost 300 miles away from the next white settlement. Conrad describes the men as typical examples of civilized society: | ||||||
| "They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organisation of civilised crowds. Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinions." |
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| Taken out of this crowd and put on his own, men is like an isolated ant: | ||||||
| "But on the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitve nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one`s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one`s thoughts, of one`s sensations - to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilised nerves of the foolish and the wise alike." | ||||||
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