Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

I can't help but reflect on the similarities between Kurtz and the Copenhagen delegates. With the outcome all but determined, the parallels of self interest as motivator and ultimate destroyer are depressingly clear. Marlow says "I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice". But I am not choosing inaction in Copenhagen. I don't want to be loyal to this.

Full of beautiful writing and horrific ideas, this might be the shortest book on the BBC Top 100 but it is dense. In 76 pages there are lessons on death, journeys and endings, greed, destruction, the effect and transience of civilisation. The racism and descent into insanity reminded me of the Howard years here in Australia. And while I could spend considerable time on any one of those, the concept that is resonating most strongly with me after reading Heart of Darkness is never directly, or indirectly, discussed in the book: animal rights.

This is a timely issue in my life. After many years as a vegetarian I recently decided, after reading Jonathon Safran Foer's Eating Animals, I was being hypocritical and decided to become vegan. I couldn't help be struck by the similarities between the treatment and language used to describe the "niggers" Conrad writes about (his term not mine), and the way animals are considered today. Consider this:

"...slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant", or this

"Can't say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles on, may be considered as a permanent improvement."

To a modern mind this is clearly horrific, unempathetic language more familiar today when discussing animals - or rather, when discussing food. Meat, that stuff in cling-wrap.

Animals are the modern day "nigger". They are voiceless, dis-empowered. They are commodities, completely dispensible, and unknowable. Marlow is the only character who bravely attempts a challenge, "well you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman." Hopefully someday the majority will examine the issue and find that even the inhuman don't deserve slaughter.

Conrad notes that when the civilized Roman's conquered Britain they brutalized the savages. Time changes goes the cliche and perhaps animals will someday have more than they do at the moment. (By the time you read this paragraph three thousand animals will have been slaughtered for food.)

One of the more beautiful lines of the book goes to Marlow who, in another moment of empathy, remarks on one of the African women. "Savage and superb, wide-eyed and magnificent". This attempt to understand or appreciate in relative terms is the beginnings of respect.