Youth. A lesson in style

“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously, mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within.

“Then the oars were got out, and the boats forming in a line moved round her remains as if in procession—the long-boat leading. As we pulled across her stern a slim dart of fire shot out viciously at us, and suddenly she went down, head first, in a great hiss of steam. The unconsumed stern was the last to sink; but the paint had gone, had cracked, had peeled off, and there were no letters, there was no word, no stubborn device that was like her soul, to flash at the rising sun her creed and her name."

Joseph Conrad, Youth, A Narrative

On the beauty of literature

Someone recently asked me (and I was totally surprised to be asked by that person: he was an author himself, a journalist, a commentator on literature):

What do you mean, beauty of literature?

Well. I guess we all read for different reasons. Some do it professionally. Others, to find out what happened. And others--to writhe in pleasure.

I am with the last cohort and this is what I mean:

We knew him in those unprotected days when we were content to hold in our hands our lives and our property. None of us, I believe, has any property now, and I hear that many, negligently, have lost their lives. But I am sure that the few who survive are not yet so dim-eyed as to miss in the befogged respectability of their newspapers the intelligence of various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago. Sunshine gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs—sunshine and the glitter of the sea. A strange name wakes up memories. The printed words scent the smoky atmosphere of the day faintly, with the subtle and penetrating perfume of land breezes breathing through the starlight of bygone nights. A signal fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a somber cliff. Great trees, the advance sentries of immense forests, stand watchful and over-steeping stretches of open water. A line of white surf thunders on an empty beach. The shallow water foams on the reefs. And green islets scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon the level of a polished sea, like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of steel.

Now, I don't like the story. It's romantic in the worst sense of the word. But that first paragraph--I have read it over and over.

Joseph Conrad, Karain, A memory

Make new friends and kill them

1600 BC. A Minoan ship in search of the sources of Amber enters the never-never land.

Beyond the Trojan straits lies the Sea of the North (the Black Sea, the Hospitable Sea), and into it flows a great river (Dnipro, my friends, Dnipro). And up that river, our adventurers go (bronze helmets and horsehair panaches and all). And up that river, a welcoming committee awaits them.

A little short on clothing and manners, but enthusiastic all the same.

Come, make new friends, and kill them.