Shadow-Line (Conrad, 1917)

Joseph Conrad. The Shadow-Line. Pub. 1917. CUP, 2013.

• 11: the first paras are gorgeous, the way he starts in reflective mode and somehow goes onto a more abstract diegetic plane before returning to narration
• 12 "the complex British empire"
• 13 "a soft, cryptic utterance that seemed to reach deeper than any diamond hard tool" -- feels a bit metafictive
• 17 Giles "platitudes with honest conviction"
• 19 "things out east were made easy for white men. That was alright. The difficulty was to go on keeping white, and some of these boys didn't know how."
• 20-1 "The papers were old and uninteresting, filled up mostly with dreary stereotypes descriptions of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee celebrations."
• 25 The "spiritual drowsiness" that overcomes the narrator when thinking of the inanity of his conversation with Giles (and shipboard life)
• 27 "will" having nothing to do with his talking to the steward— foreshadowing
• "human nature is, I fear, not very nice right through. There are ugly spots in it."
• 29 the occult power of ordinary words— "I say" in getting information out of the steward, "Command" as he goes to the Harbour Office
• 30 "quill-driver" (pencil-pusher)— something interesting on modernity’s hate for and reliance on bureaucracy
• 34 wonderful passage from "The favour...decidedly inferior" FILL IN
• 35 destined for this command by something higher than "the prosaic agencies of the commercial world"
• 38 "I was very much like people in fairy tales. Nothing astonishes them."
• 41

The road would be long. All roads are long that lead towards one's heart's desire. But this road my mind's eye could see on a chart, professionally, with all its complications and difficulties, yet simple enough in its way. One is a seaman or one is not. And I had no doubt of being one. 

• 43 Bangkok "the Oriental capital that had as yet suffered no white conqueror"
• 47 you too para FILL IN
• 51ff Burns's account of the old Captain's crazy, vengeful last journey like the embedded stories Marlow recounts in Lord Jim
  • 53 "He had made up his mind to cut adrift from everything"
• 54 Burns "forgot the telegraph cable" that would put the narrator in command instead of him
• 56-7 delay by cholera/malaria
• 66-7 the way the commonplace gets invested with the occult (i.e., Burns's conviction that the dead captain is cursing the ship)
• 69 "I don't know what I expected. Perhaps nothing else than that special intensity of existence which Ustane quintessence of youthful aspirations."
• uh oh -- the supply of quinine is something else (76 Burns believes the dead captain sold it)
• 78 narration fragmenting into notes he "wrote at the time" as it narrates the ceaseless mechanical changing of time
• writing a journal as relief and not egotism in extremity, a coping mechanism and a formal question of representation as the increasing gothicism of his account
• 90-1 the careful building management of tension before "Suddenly -- how am I to convey it? Well, suddenly the darkness turned into water."
• 102 Ransome insisting he go to shore: "and I saw under the worth and the comeliness of the man the humble reality of things. Life was a boon in itself to him, this precarious hard life -- and he was thoroughly alarmed about himself."
• 104 living at half speed -- "a man should stand up to his bad luck, his mistakes, to his conscience and all that sort of thing. Why -- what else would he have to fight against?"