From the Bin: Conrad on the Market

Wonder what prompted me to file this one away:

The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that account -- but as to effectually lifting a little finger -- oh, no ... Their talk ... was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware that these things are wanted for the work of the world.

--Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Naipaul's Pessimism

I've never known quite what to make about this, but it has been in my notes since the novel was new:

My family were not fools. My father and his brothers were traders, businessmen; in their own way they had to keep up with the times. They could assess situations; they took risks and sometimes they could be very bold. But they were buried so deep in their lives that they were not able to stand back and consider the nature of their lives. They did what they had to do. When things went wrong they had the consolations of religion. This wasn't just a readiness to accept Fate; this was a quiet and profound conviction about th vanity of all human endeavour.

I could never rise so high. My pessimism, my insecurity, was a more terrestrial affair. I was without the religious sense of my family. The insecurity I felt was due to my lack of true religion, and was like the small change of the exalted pessimism of our faith, the pessimism that can drive men on to do wonders. It wa the price for my more materialist attitude, my seeking to occupy the middle ground, between absorption in life and soaring above the care of the earth.

VS Naipaul, A Bend in the River 16 (1978)

"And What About the Girl Up Against the Barrel?"

Some will find this depressing; some, simply maudlin:

The patients were stuck on hard chairs round the walls of the waiting room and smelled of garlic and sour clothes. Except for a pale girl reading a copy of Marie-Claire they were all ugly and old and stamped on. Yet the nun in the métro, Dugommier was sure, would have said that God loved all those cartwheel ears and gobby eyes, all those unthinking noses and unseeing mouths, and perhaps that was the only answer to their lack of success in the Gadarene rush. A few thousand more bus rides from the Louvre to the Porte des Lilas, a few thousand more walks along the dank corridors of Châtelet, a few hundred more revolting caresses, a whisk of holy water from the hyssop and out they would be tipped into the grave, their laughters at Fernandel forgotten, and another corpse pitched in to rot on top of theirs if their relatives didn't stump up another five years' cemetery rent in time.

Such might soon be his own fate if the doctor didn't manage to cure his breathlessness. Flung into a coffin in the bed in which he had died, nailed down behind the screens with all the other patients listening, and then off to Paradise, via the Porte de Pantin. And would there be Paradise? "What about the girl up against the barrel at Noeux-les-Mines?" God might ask. "Please, God, I also loved Mallarmé," he would reply trying to make himself heard aboive the hundred and eighty-three Spaniards, Russians, Swedes, Finns and Brazilians thrown up from their fornications in the same minute of hearing.

--Bruce Marshall, The Accounting 221-2 (1958)

"Mallarmé" is, I suppose, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and the issue of just what he has to do with it might invite a more explicit answer. Still, on the whole I rather liked this bit.