HOD Flashcards
darkness in Europe (6)
“the offing was barred by a black bank of clouds… [that] seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”
“A whisper that seemed to swell menacingly…’The horror! The Horror!’”
“I arrived in a city that always make me think of a whited sepulchre.”
“knit black wool”
“guarding the door of Darkness”
“His was an impenetrable darkness”- Kurtz
Kurtz (23)
“All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”
“Barren darkness of his heart.”
“it”
“wraith”
“devil”
“open[ing] his mouth wide…as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”
“ivory ball”
“Jupiter”
“My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas”
“The horror! The horror!”
“muddy hole”
“amazing”
“miracle”
‘a first-class agent…a very remarkable person…sends in as much ivory as all the others put together.’
‘a prodigy … an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else … a special being.” 30
“voice” 58
“the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.’ 58
‘The opening paragraph … began with the argument that we whites … must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings - we approach them with the might of a deity…By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded” 61 report
“exterminate all the brutes!”
“this man has enlarged my mind” (Russian)
‘…there was nothing on earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased.’ 70
But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core..” 72
“the Shadow”
descriptions of Africa (2)
“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginning of the world”
‘Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild.’ 23
descriptions of Africans
“wild vitality [and] intense energy”
“glistening…bodies”
“ants”
“thing[s]”
“dead as the carcass of some animal.”
“improved specimen” - “dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs”.
“savages”
“cannibals”
“ a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping. of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling” 43
“they were not inhuman … that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman … what thrilled you was …the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar” 44
‘catch ‘im ….’Eat ‘im!’ 49
‘They still belonged to the beginnings of time - had no inherited experience to teach them as it were…” 50
There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks.’ 73
“… near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.
“She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high… She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
“She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. A formidable silence hung over the scene. 75-76
darkness and nightmares in Africa
“creeping mist” “black…jungle” Closer to inner station: “trance” “blinding…fog” “scream[ing] … mist” “appalling and excessive silence.” “blurr[es]” “dissolv[es]” “nowhere” ‘The earth seemed unearthly” 44
descriptions of Europeans
“flabby devils”
flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.’
Europe in africa
“objectless blasting”
“clinking”
“shelling the bush.”- “incomprehensible”, “insan[e]”, “feeble”
“Dance of death and trade” in a “catacomb”
“pin-head…on the untouched expanse of background.”
“waste”
“in the empty immensity of earth, sky and water.”
“glamour”
‘There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there…
“I was also one of the Workers, with a capital – you know. Something like and emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle.” 14
“the Company was run for profit.’”
To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.’ - Eldorado 36
a centre for trade of course, but also for humanising, improving, instructing.” 40
“that ass! He wants to be manager!” 40
“These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky …. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house.” 71
nature
“wall”
‘the silent wilderness …struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.’
Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally” 31
‘We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air … 43
‘We were on the deck at the time … I looked around, and I don’t know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.’
pilgrims
“wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched.”
“staves” “squirt lead”
“You would think they were praying to it.” (ivory)
descriptions of Marlow and things he said
“resembled an idol.”
‘We live in the flicker”
“Buddha”
They grabbed what they could get and for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery without violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.’ (Marlow about the Romans)
“we live as we dream —alone” 33
‘Evidently the appetite for more ivory had got the better of the—what shall I say?—less material aspirations.’ 71
thames
‘The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service…’
‘And this also…has been one of the dark places of the earth.’
king Leopold
“I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake”
