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May 8, 2004
Insidious Fatigue
I find it harder and harder to find the time to read, and almost impossible to withdraw into books the way I used to. Now I listen to my books; in the car, at work, wherever I can. I enjoy the sounds of the words, the rhythm that a great author has. Right now I'm listening to "Typhoon" by Joseph Conrad. I had read "Heart of Darkness" many years ago but never read anything else by Conrad. How wonderful the words feel as I listen to them. I think it is obvious when an author really loves words; loves the sound, the feel, the weight, the mixing, the the flow of them. Tolkein is the same way. When I listen to his books I can almost dismiss the story and float on the river of words.
I was driving somewhere yesterday. Don't remember where for sure. It really doesn't matter. I was listening to "Typhoon", kind of half in and half out of it. The following passage grabbed my total attention:
"These are the moments of do-nothing heroics to which even good men surrender at times. Many officers of ships can no doubt recall a case in their experience when just such a trance of confounded stoicism would come all at once over a whole ship's company. Jukes, however, had no wide experience of men or storms. He conceived himself to be calm -- inexorably calm; but as a matter of fact he was daunted; not abjectly, but only so far as a decent man may, without becoming loathsome to himself.
It was rather like a forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long stress of a gale does it; the suspense of the interminably culminating catastrophe; and there is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on to existence within the excessive tumult; a searching and insidious fatigue that penetrates deep into a man's breast to cast down and sadden his heart, which is incorrigible, and of all the gifts of the earth -- even before life itself -aspires to peace."
Joseph Conrad, roughly one hundred years ago, described me -- the me inside. "...a forced-on numbness of spirit..." "...a searching and insidious fatigue..." If I just replaced a few words it would describe the numbness of my existence. I would probably say: "The long, long stress of my life has done it; the suspense of the interminably culminating catastrophe." I suspect that the gale is just going to keep on blowing.
Posted by swift at 4:24 AM