Lord Jim

Today, my foot continues to be really sore, but marginally not as bad as yesterday. I decided this would be a day to keep off it. What better time to read Joseph Conrad. It has been many years since I read Lord Jim, and some sections still resonate with me - such as the butterflies and beetles section.

From the introduction of my Penguin, by Cedric Watts:
"In July 1900, Conrad finished Lord Jim at dawn after writing all night. (A mound of cigarette-ends nearby; pages of manuscript blowing about the study in the morning breeze.) He wrote the last word, went into the dining-room, and shared a piece of cold chicken with his dog. Sixty-one years later, sitting in a sunny back-yard with my feet propped on a dustbin, I ended my first reading of the novel. The blurb on the rear cover of my Penguin text said of Jim: 'No less fascinating than the motives and adventures of this strange personality is Conrad's method of unfolding the story.' I reflected for a while, took up my pen, crossed out 'fascinating' and wrote above it 'infuriating'. After a further quarter of a century, the word 'infuriating' is still legible on my copy, but the ink has faded, and so has my hostility to the text."

And, "Conrad's Lord Jim is, in the main, a novel which time makes truer. Probably most of us come to feel what the text suggests: that we contain more potential lives than real lie permits us to realize; that imagination is both blessing and curse; that idealism offers both vindication and mockery; and that art's particularity liberates such generalizations (and, perhaps, people themselves) from the empire of platitude."