Welcome to Part Ten of our current Tale for Our Time - Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness. In our ninth year of audio adventures, this is only my second venture into the Conrad oeuvre. But listeners seem to be enjoying it.
In tonight's episode our protagonist cautions that the average chap "with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours" and "the butcher and the policeman" and the other apparently minor props of an ordered society cannot understand the pressures upon a civilised man when he finds himself in a primitive society:
These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil—I don't know which... But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.
But you no longer have to go up the Congo to confront that challenge. In western cities, the "solid pavement under your feet" is not quite as solid as it was: the butcher is halal, and the policeman is a diversity enforcer anxious to rule your tweet a "non-crime hate incident". A primitive society has its certainties; a re-primitivising one not so much.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear Part Ten of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in.
You can enjoy Heart of Darkness episode by episode, night by night, twenty minutes before you lower your lamp. Or, alternatively, do feel free to binge-listen: you can find all the earlier installments here.
If you've yet to hear any of our first seventy-two Tales for Our Time, you can do so by joining The Mark Steyn Club. Or, if you need an extra-special present for someone, why not give your loved one a Gift Membership and start him or her off with six dozen cracking yarns? And do join us tomorrow for another episode of this Joseph Conrad classic.
