Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time), I hope to be here for another edition of our Clubland Q&A, taking questions from Mark Steyn Club listeners around the world. Hope you can swing by.
~Our summer Tale for Our Time, and the seventy-second of our Steyn Club audio adventures, is my serialisation of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's classic of 1899. In tonight's episode, our protagonist finds his fellow Europeans both absurd and disturbing:
I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear Part Five of our adventure simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes of Heart of Darkness can be found here, and previous Tales for Our Time here.
If you'd like to join The Mark Steyn Club, we'd love to have you: please see here. And, if you've a chum who enjoys classic fiction, we've introduced a special Steyn Gift Membership: you'll find more details here. Oh, and we also do video poetry - and an annual Steyn Cruise.
Please join me tomorrow evening for Part Six of Heart of Darkness.
