On Reading Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is always an interesting experience. Conrad’s dense prose is an interesting challenge, and I find myself forced to pay much more attention to detail than I often do with other texts. 🙂 I’m always most drawn to the argument that Marlow advances at the outset of his tale: that the power of England, as impressive as it seems, is really nothing more than a brief moment in history:

“I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago — the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since — you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Marlow’s comparison is powerful: what the English saw was a historical epoch, was by the standards of human history, nothing more than a flicker or flash of lightning. It’s hard not to think about America’s position in the world when reading these words. Do many people of great empires ever have the insight that Conrad/Marlow did, and see the “brooding gloom” descend over their empire?