“It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmers biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit – to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work, – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”It’s hard to believe that the ‘battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot’ steamboat, at least during this passage, doesn’t represent ‘the work’ of writing the book itself, the opportunity to ‘find out what I could do’. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, given that I’m up the proverbial creek myself without so much as a paddle or a handful of rivets. Maybe that’s also why this re-read of HEART OF DARKNESS put me in mind of MOBY-DICK, and that ‘the horror, the horror’ is that of the blank page.
Tune in next week, when I read THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS and reconfigure ‘messing about in boats’ as a cry for help from an author becalmed in the backwater of a first draft, pulled hither and yon by the gentle ripples and eddies of pitiless fate, etc …
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