Another weekly visit to Ulladulla, to the local pool, and lunch, this time at the historic Marlin Hotel. Then a quick visit to our favourite op-shop where I found this:
Part mariner's log and part detective story, this book evokes the Far East of Conrad's novels. When Gavin Young writes in his introduction to this book, "My obsession with Joseph Conrad got into its stride ... after I read a passage from the story Youth - a story that said in so many words, 'Catch life on a wing - but hurry!'", he takes the words right out of my mouth.
"I need not tell you what it is to be knocking about in an open boat. I remember nights and days of calm when we pulled, we pulled, and the boat seemed to stand still, as if bewitched within the circle of the sea horizon. I remember the heat, the deluge of rain-squalls that kept us baling for dear life (but filled our water-cask), and I remember sixteen hours on end with a mouth dry as a cinder and a steering-oar over the stern to keep my first command head on to a breaking sea. I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—before life itself." Extract from Joseph Conrad's YOUTH
This book is a pilgrimage - a search for scenes and ghosts known to that heavily accented foreigner from Eastern Europe, whose English shipmates nicknamed him 'Polish Joe' and who became one of the greatest novelists in the English language. It's a great read!
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