There’s a new documentary on HBO about the workers inside the Fukushima disaster. Liz and I finished it tonight, and it was so good. It was pretty amazing to hear their stories, and look the people in the eye, so to speak, who put their lives on the line to contain those meltdowns. Highly recommend it.
I got my pages done. Pretty remarkable to me that I’ve managed to do that over the past three weeks with everything that’s gone on. It’s a testament, for sure, to my routine, my goals being reasonable, and to the power of being in the momentum stage of the drafting. The story comes easily right now, because the action is so clear, as are the conflicts and the relationships. I enjoy this portion so much.
I finished Heart of Darkness, which I never read for school. That book’s prose is as dense and foreboding as the jungle he describes. It’s a rather disorienting and anguishing read, which I think is exactly what he intended. I think my only critique of it, really, is that I didn’t quite feel that Kurtz was as monstrous and mad as he’d been built up to be—we saw none of his rituals, nor his raids, nor his barbarism. We pulled him out of it, too, with ease, which I think Conrad was probably aware of, hence the scene where Marlow wakes in the night to find him crawling back towards the tribe and their fires. Heads on spikes weren’t enough for me, I guess. But it was dense in a rather incredible way, I think. It was a thicket of striking thoughts put down in striking sentences. I could have highlighted half of the book as quote-worthy. A wildly fascinating mixture of extemporaneous-feeling run-on consciousness, and meticulous crafting. A worthy classic, I’d say. I’ll need to read it again, someday, when my comprehension skills have gone up another level. There is certainly a multitude in what I missed this first time through.
I don’t know if I’ll use it for my next book or not. There are aspects of the story that might work, but we’ll see. It’s interesting that the universal takeaway seems to be that it’s about colonialism—and on reflection, I agree, it certainly is—but that didn’t strike me, specifically, as I read it. It seemed to me to be about humanity writ-large, and what happens to us when we’re stripped of our civilization; there is savagery within the dark parts of all our hearts, as much as there is in the dark untamed jungle. We should be mindful of that and take care. It’s an always-appropriate warning, whether in colonial times, or today.
Night night.