I think the knowledge came to him at last, only at the very last.

But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion.

I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know,

things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude, and the

whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. Anything approaching the change that came over his

features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again.

Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw in that ivory

face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his

life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of

complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision. He cried out twice, a cry

that was no more than a breath. The horror. The horror. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

The 20th century. Episode 19, Heart of Darkness, Part 1

Josef Teodor Konrad Korsznyovsky was an ethnic pole born in Russia in 1857.

As a teenager, he became a sailor and traveled the world serving on French, British, and Belgian merchant vessels.

He became a British subject in 1886. By 1894, he had

quit the sea for a career as a writer. He wrote in English, despite that being his third

language, after Polish and French, and made a name for himself as Joseph Conrad. His writing is notable for its

complex prose, haunted by pessimism and self-doubt, and his reliance on his personal experiences

as a sailor. The year 1899 saw the first publication of what is today his most famous work, Heart of Darkness.

Heart of Darkness is still much read, much studied, and much admired to this day.

Nowadays it's read mostly as a parable about the universal themes of good and evil, innocence

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