{"id":63,"date":"2014-03-16T23:54:08","date_gmt":"2014-03-17T06:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/?p=63"},"modified":"2014-03-16T23:54:08","modified_gmt":"2014-03-17T06:54:08","slug":"darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/2014\/03\/16\/darkness\/","title":{"rendered":"“darkness”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I really enjoyed\u00a0Heart of Darkness<\/em>, but I’m fairly sure I understood almost none of it. (Lecture tends to be good at clarifying things for me though, so I’m not too worried.)<\/p>\n

The first thing I noticed was the chunks of text and lack of paragraph separation, I will admit. I grew used to it as I kept reading, but it doesn’t look very approachable. Also, Conrad’s language is\u00a0very<\/span> descriptive, to the point where I would call it flowery. I don’t think this detracts from the understanding of the book, but it’s worth commenting on.<\/p>\n

Also, his tone is very conversational. Obviously the whole thing is told in the form of a story, but it’s gratifying as a reader to pick up a book and feel like the author (and, by extension, the characters) are speaking to you directly. He has certain expressions that are just unbelievably gorgeous, and I flagged some pages simply because the words he used made me go back and read the passage again and again. For instance:<\/p>\n

“One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same.” (69-70)\u00a0<\/strong>This is just so eloquently worded … and it applies to a lot of situations. The minor details all blend together and in the long run, the world\/sea\/life is fairly uniform.<\/p>\n

“… the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear …” (72)\u00a0<\/strong>This is just really accurate, so I thought I’d point it out.<\/p>\n

“We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.” (107)\u00a0<\/strong>This deals with a few concepts we’ve touched on already in Arts One. It talks about memories as well as the concept of suppressing those memories, intentionally or otherwise, and not leaving a sign (silencing?) past events. Wow, this text is remaking\/remodelling previous texts.<\/p>\n

A closing word: I intended to flag all the places where ‘darkness’ comes up so I could accurately point out all the things it could mean, but I failed pretty early on and gave up. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to go through it again, because I think the different meanings of ‘darkness’ are definitely applicable. Darkness = desolation, negativity, skin colour, death, the power of the devil, etc.<\/p>\n

I hate feeling like I’m missing the point, as I often do with that ‘story about a story’ kind of book. Oh well. All will become clear soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I really enjoyed\u00a0Heart of Darkness, but I’m fairly sure I understood almost none of it. (Lecture tends to be good at clarifying things for me though, so I’m not too worried.) The first thing I noticed was the chunks of text and lack of paragraph separation, I will admit. I grew used to it as I kept reading, but it doesn’t look very approachable. Also, Conrad’s language is\u00a0very descriptive, to the point where I would call it flowery. I don’t think this detracts from the understanding of the book, but…read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","et-no-image","et-bg-layout-dark","et-white-bg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}