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He studied at the School of Education and Teaching. He was working as teacher in literature before the revolution in Iran in the 70s. He settled in Sweden with his family after the revolution, when the intellectuals felt threatened by the regime in Iran. Although he has lived most of his adult life in Sweden, he has never given up hope for freedom in Iran. He has operated as a local radio station broadcaster for two decades.

A popular station called "Radio Iran on Air" which provides poetry, popular music and political debates. His latest book with the title "The dance of butterflies" is written in Persian so far, but will be translated in English and Swedish in the nearest future. This book is the first of seven parts! For an entire checklist of obtainable titles stopover at www. Show description Continue reading "Wie das Leben so spielt: Geschichten aus der Kriegs- und - download pdf or read online". During a faculty journey to Buchenwald focus camp, a tender French instructor comes throughout a photo of a guy whose resemblance to his personal father, Adrien, is uncanny.

Returning to France, he reveals that the reminiscence of the photo refuses to depart him. He comes to a decision to embark on a look for its topic, which takes him to the Buchenwald data, to the guts of the Nazi computer, yet extra disturbingly, attracts him into the darkish center of his family. A sophisticated, relocating booklet, The Origins of Violence indicates the unlimited ways that people inflict damage on one another, and the way person humans, now not societies, are the perpetrators.

By Andrey Platonov "Reading Platonov, one will get a feeling of the relentless, implacable absurdity equipped into the language and with each Er hat mich auf einen Weg gebracht, vond em ich ernsthaft nicht mehr abgewichen bin. By Wilson Harris 'I was once obsessed - enable me confess - via towns and settlements within the primary and South Americas which are an enigma to many students.

The horrifying threat of a nuclear disaster is far from over. Every nuclear country is upgrading its nuclear arsenal and nuclear proliferation will continue, combined with the possibility of nuclear terrorism and accidental nuclear war. The consequences of one single nuclear bomb will be horrific and unfathomable.

Currently such a bomb can be carried in a backpack. A Portrait of Jews in Germany, — A portrait of Berlin in the s. Fromm International Publishing Company. Sime, Ruth Lewin Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics. University of California Press. A History of the Thirty Years War. Hauser visade mot en flygel och muttrade korthugget: Det var helt i enighet med tidsandan. Tiotusental — i Det Heliga Kriget. Sociologen Max Weber var begeistrad: Hur kom det sig? En mycket speciell kvinna. Elon, Amos The Pity of it All: Friedrich, Otto Before the Deluge: En bok om atombomben.

Last night it was the full moon in Rome. Some people find the moon's cool glow scary. My mother once told me how she as a young and newly betrothed nurse walked through a nocturnal small town in company with my father and his friend. It is perhaps not surprising that the earth's constant companion has been worshiped as a deity, more mysterious and distant than the warm, life-giving, and substantially more powerful sun. The moon's weaker light which reigns over the night makes its presence more discreet, more mysterious than the sun, which with its overwhelming light reveals more than it conceals.

The moon exposes its pale, mottled face when most of us are asleep and it is thus esteemed by predators and people with bad intentions. The moon is companion and beacon of dark forces. Like the sun, the moon's regular habits reign over time. The white celestial body even seems to influence women's bodies. The moon's cycle that roughly covers Since it is non-pregnant, but yet fertile, women who menstruate the moon has become a symbol for both fertility and virginity and it is also believed to affect the vegetation.

The moon's varied nature, its pallor, apparent power over growth, water and women, has made people believe that it can also exert influence on our thinking. Far from all of its secrets have been revealed. In the northern realms, with sparse population, vast expanses of snow, long endless nights and dark oceans the firmament seems to be close to earth. In the north people are familiar with the lights of heaven, they navigate by them, and with trepidation they perceive their influence.

Seas that both unite and divide people. Around the White Sea live Finns, Karelians, Sami, Russians and Nenets, people who during millennia have divided and mixed their culture, religion and worldviews. Since ancient times, people have travelled across the White Sea. Along its shores and on its islands we find traces of beliefs that have long since been forgotten, notions shared by people thousands of years before Christ.

On the island of Bolshoi Zavatskty we find, for example, thirteen remarkable stone labyrinths and no less than small pyramid-shaped piles of boulders. The mazes are concentrated to the western part, while most rock formations are found in the west. Until the s, rune songs were sung in Finland and Karelia. They were ballads with a historical and religious content; epic descriptions of the exploits of legendary heroes, love songs and spells. The State supported Reformation was opposed to non-Christian traditions, the Sami religion was persecuted and Finnish rune songs banned.

In remote areas, however, these songs lived on. The stories may be understood against the background of the harsh life in the White Sea area. The tales often deal with mighty men trying to find rune songs that may help them to master skills like boatbuilding or forging, or influence other persons. Most skilled of all blacksmiths was Ilmarinen, who once crafted the sky without traces of either nails or hammers.

The friends, however, were not so triumphant in love. Pohjola was home of eternal cold and wickedness. It may described as a wealth producing mill, or cornucopia. Obviously the object that Ilmarinen finally forged and bequeathed to Louhi was a kind of machine mirroring the generating power of nature. Enraged, Luohi stole and hid the sun and moon in her deep cave. Ilmarinen tried in vain to forge the heavenly bodies, but without light and heat they could not work. Inventors and poets who were constantly on the lookout for, and fighting for something that lied beyond their everyday lives.

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Zavatsky is one of island constituting the Solovetsky archipelago. Actually, the southern part of the White Sea is not so chilly as the gloomy Pohjola and Tuonela. The sea lies just below the Arctic Circle and like the Northern parts of Scandinavia there are beyond its beaches and on its islands vast forests and swamps, lush flower meadows, lakes and granite cliffs. There are also plenty of mosquitoes and the summer nights are bright. Kelp was used as a fertilizer, food for humans and fodder for animals. However, not only industry and piety have characterized the Solvetsky Islands, evil and death have also had an abode there.

Behind the walls of grey stone blocks, with pointed, defensive towers, the great Solvetsky monastery rises its dazzling white walls, crowned with black onion domes. In , the parents of the pious monk Zosimas died and he decided to withdraw from the world to live as a hermit on the secluded Solvetsky Island.

Zosimas was soon joined by a small group of like-minded monks. A monastery soon grew up around the venerated Zosimas and after only twenty years it became the richest abbey in the entire Novgorod Republic. The Novgorod Republic subsisted between the year and , ranging from the Arctic Ocean in the north, the Baltic Sea in the west, and all the way to the Ural Mountains in the east. Through its trade with the German Hanseatic League, Novgorod had become a wealthy and powerful city.

It traded furs, salt, dried fish, iron ore, walrus tusks and pearls to Germans, Danes and Swedes, products that often originated in the White Sea. The Solvetsky monastery is surrounded by strong walls due to the fact that Karelia was a disputed region, where religious and economic interests caused fierce clashes between Swedes and Novgorodians. In the east, Karelians were Christianized by Russian Orthodox missionaries, while Swedish Catholics preached their faith in the western parts.

Proselytizing zealots were protected by different warlords. Nevertheless, conflicts between the two nations flared up periodically. In , the Swedes attacked the Solvetsky monastery, which after repeated attacks surrendered in In , the Swedes pulled out from Solovky where the walls had been reinforced. The monastery remained one of the richest and most revered religious communities in Russia. During the late s, 24, pilgrims came every year to the remote Solovky Island, which could only be reached after a more than two-hour long boat ride.

Political prisoners were shipped to the isolated island accused for offending the Bolshevik state. They were "intellectual" criminals, members of political groupings that had been averse to the Bolsheviks, or "religious fanatics", i.

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Between and , the Bolshevik state apparatus sent an estimated 80 prisoners to Solovky, half of them came back alive, the others had been shot or perished through malnutrition, cold, torture and diseases. This was mainly due to one of the prisoners - Aronovich Naftaly Frenkel, who originally came from Haifa in what was then Palestine. Frenkel had been arrested for "illegal border trade" and sentenced to ten years in Solovky. He observed the mismanagement and bad administration and suggested to the commandant, who curiously enough was named Eichmans, that he would allow the prisoners to work, instead of being locked up.

Frenkel also recommended that the prisoners' rations ought to be calculated according to the amount and effectiveness of the work they had performed. Naftaly Frenkel was pardoned, promoted to gaoler and later commandant of the entire Solovky lager. He then became one of the managers of the notorious slave labour on the White Sea Canal, which connected the Baltic Sea with the White Sea. It was excavated between and by more than , slave labourers, under brutal and primitive conditions which cost the lives of a fifth of the work force.

Frenkel is seen on the far right of the picture below. The Solovky Island was a perfect place for a labour camp. Chances for a successful escape were minimal and thus there was no need barbed wire. The island was covered with spruce and logging, as well as the harvesting and processing of seaweed, became the prisoners' main task, in addition — the algae could be eaten.

Punishment and torture were facilitated by nature and climate — in summertime prisoners could be stripped, tied to tree trunks and merciless exposed to mosquitoes and other insects. The shrine of Sekirka had been built to provide a place for quiet meditation, but after the monks had been expelled, small solitary cells had been built within the interior. Here prisoners were locked up and forced to await what often would be their execution. They slept separated from the men, but were treated just as brutally as they. For example, a group of rebellious women were removed to a deserted island where they were left to die from cold and starvation.

In early , the saintly Pavel Florensky arrived in Solovky, sentenced to ten years' hard labour for violating Article 54 of Stalin's criminal code, clauses ten and eleven: He had speculated whether a geometric representation of imaginary numbers, predicted by a strict application of the theory of relativity on a body moving faster than light, could be used as to model the geometry of the Kingdom of God. To me this appears as incomprehensible, but for the Stalinists it was enough to sentence Florensky to a painful disappearance.

The harsh verdict was certainly due to the fact that Florensky was no ordinary scatter-brained maniac, but a highly respected scientist. Lev Trotsky had entrusted him with participation in the drafting of a national plan for electrification of the Soviet Union. Before sentencing Florensky the court had offered him to exile to Paris, together with his family, but he refused on the grounds that an acceptance of the terms would mean that he denied his Christian faith and was forced to renounce his actions. Instead Florensky pleaded guilty to all charges, declaring he was ready to sacrifice himself if he thus could avoid to unjustly accuse others.

When he arrived at Solovkij, Florensky was subjected to the same degrading treatment as other newly arrived prisoners; starvation food, sleep in unheated, common rooms, hard forest work and often unjustified punishments, all intended to break the prisoners and make them docile. Eventually he was transferred to a "laboratory" where Florensky and a few colleagues busied themselves with trying to find the best method for extracting iodine from kelp. Florensky had since his childhood been keenly interested in the creation of electrical current from both static and dynamic processes.

While on the Solovky Island, he carried out comprehensive studies of wave -, wind - and solar power. Florensky also speculated about the beauty of ice and snow flakes, their ephemeral nature and the processes that created their geometric patterns. Florensky was a scientist, an engineer, a mathematician and an aesthete, with a lively interest in art and music, constantly in search of the structure of divine creation. Above all, Florensky was a mystic who marvelled at the beauty of the Solvetsky archipelago and like others before him Florensky assumed he sensed a spiritual presence at the Solovky Island.

Florensky's refusal to abandon his Christian faith irritated the authorities. In , Florensky was transferred to Leningrad where he during a secret trial was sentenced to death on December 8 and boarded a train with other political prisoners. They arrived at an unknown destination, where all of them were executed. This was not known until , previously Florensky's family had been told that he died of illness.

Like Florensky, Swedenborg was a mathematician fascinated by geometry, he was engaged with chemical experiments and an international authority on metallurgy. Swedenborg gradually became more and more engaged in religious speculations and pursued a theory able to explain the relationship between spirit and matter. Like many contemporary philosophers, Swedenborg searched in the human anatomy for a nexus between soul and body.

In , he suffered a profound spiritual crisis and became a changed man, who nevertheless continued to believe that the spiritual realm and daily life were interconnected. In one impressive book after another Swedenborg described his experiences and observations in the spiritual realm and applied his insights to our daily existing. Florensky was also a practical man; engineer, chemist and mathematician. Just like the Swedish mystic he assumed that a logical, mechanical worldview was inadequate and sought a relationship between nature matter , the spiritual, and the Kingdom of Heaven.

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With the help of mathematics Florensky tried to unite spiritual and scientific approaches. His studies took him beyond "the physical limitations of knowledge," and he began socializing with "spiritually inspired" musicians, artists and writers, not least Andrei Bely, the son of his mathematics professor. In his poems and novels Bely had tried to combine music and literature, as well as eastern and western philosophy and spirituality.

Petersburg, just before the Revolution of The confused, young man, who is a victim of diverse influences and sometimes appears to confuse himself with the city he lives in, has by the revolutionaries been instructed to kill his own father.


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Like Bely, Florensky was plagued by the decay he found around himself. It's easy to waste a lifetime without a serious thought on God and the gifts He bestows upon us. To live in earnest you had to recognize that "I do not know" and be engaged in a continuous quest for God. Something that meant you must use science and studies to better appreciate how the divine manifests itself in our everyday life. After having declined a university appointment as mathematician, Florensky turned to theology and was eventually ordained as a priest.

For Florensky this meant that he continued his scientific research, got married and had children with the woman he loved, while he served as a priest and immersed himself in the study of Russian icons and folk poetry. His colleagues at government laboratories and offices where amazed when he showed up wearing his clerical robes, especially within an increasingly tougher atheistic environment created by the Bolshevik regime.

Bulgakov was exiled in and then served as a professor at the emigre Russian theological institution in Paris. When Bulgakov heard the news about Florensky's death he paid homage to his late friend by calling him a saint and writing that if anyone wanted to understand Florensky it was enough to contemplate "St. It was art that made me write this blog. Riccardo is a companion of Astrid, one of my oldest daughter's friends in Prague.

I had met them a month before they returned to Rome for the premier of the exhibition. Then we had talked about art and mysticism, so for me it was especially interesting when Riccardo explained what had inspired his artwork and that was how I learned about Florensky and the spiritual geography of the Solvetsky archipelago. Artists with prominent figures such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Kazimir Malevich wanted to create a completely new, dynamic aesthetics based on the industrial modernization of Russia's backward agricultural society.

Fyodorov advocated the application of religious thought in the scientific sphere. While we walked through his exhibition Riccardo showed me a picture of a black sea, next to a similarly black canvas on which he with white text had written the names of the 23 lunar "seas". Riccardo explained that the spindle-shaped so-called fusiform is common to several sea animals, neurons and cells, and that it was an important inspiration to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky when he in his home built the world's first wind tunnel to explore aerodynamic laws and speculate about how future space crafts could be developed.

It was the first scientific treatise dealing with the possibility of space flight. He introduced the idea of multistaged rockets, fuelled by liquid oxygen or liquid hydrogen. However, these vehicles were lighter than air. Jules Verne had in his novel a scene when a balloonist conference is interrupted by an engineer named Robur, who declares that "heavier than air" flying apparatuses are the future. I came to think of whaling boats, which had the same shape in order to be equally able to move forward and backward. The same form is linked to life and can be likened to the vagina. A motif very common on icons.

Voodooists have told me that such stones can be picked up where lightning has struck and they put them on their altars, in bowls with oil. If you anoint yourself with this magically enhanced oil it is said to have a rejuvenating effect on your skin. Central among his objects, Riccardo had placed a white structure within a circle of charcoal. Beside the black canvas with the 23 names of lunar seas is a row with 23 points at varying heights. It symbolizes the notes that two Italian radio amateurs, the brothers Achille and Giovanni Judica Cordiglia, registered in When the brothers recognized the melody through their eavesdropping equipment they knew that a Soviet rocket launch would take place and they could then follow the spacecraft's journey around the Earth and record the sounds that came from it.

In this way they succeeded, as the only private persons outside the Soviet Union, to record unique and sometimes horrifying messages. For example, the brothers recorded the sounds of a manned craft coming off course and disappearing in May In November the same year they heard cries for help from a vessel that also disappeared from its orbit around the Earth.

In February , they heard a cosmonaut choking to death in his space capsule. In May , a month after Gagarin's successful orbit around the Earth, they caught the cry for help from a space capsule that had lost control and in October the same year the same thing happened again. In November , they could hear how a female cosmonaut screamed: Riccardo had at an unreachable wall of the museum, which was blocked by charcoal, pinned up two small photographs of two of the cosmonauts assumed to have burned up or disappeared into outer space, likewise, he had beyond the charcoal belt attached small photographs of space debris swirling around the earth.

By Riccardo's works the Solvetsky islands are revealed as a link between different dimensions, combining nature, mysticism and human endeavours. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry. A History of the Soviet Camps. Verne, Jules Robur the Conquerer. En mandelformad gloria som kan omge Gud, Kristus eller Jungrfru Maria. Applebaum, Anne Gulag: Belyj, Andrej Petersburg. Berquist, Lars Swedenborgs hemlighet: Stroud, Rick The Book of the Moon. Verne, Jules Luftens herre. They participated in a study programme called "international relations" and I wanted to confront them with the how the prisms of great books may produce several different images.

How our emotions interpret books, movies or music, depending on the occasion and the circumstances during which we are confronted with them. I have read Heart of Darkness several times and each time it has come forth as a different book. William Faulkner was once asked about the three novels he would like to recommend to a student. I assume Faulkner meant that the novel had been different every time he read it. For me Heart of Darkness constantly appear in new and different guises. I listened and found that I had forgotten the detailed landscape descriptions and the scattered mind games in the beginning of the book.

I also noticed the different layers of storytelling - how an unknown sailor recalls how Marlow tells about his Congo experience to a group of his friends. About a yearning for adventure born out of youthful reading of exciting tales from different centuries and places. How Marlow, an explorer of exotic places and the human mind, to a spellbound circle of friends on the rear deck of a yacht anchored on the River Thames, related his experiences in a mysterious and alien world. I saw Apocalypse Now , and once again read Heart of Darkness , the main inspiration for the movie.

Now I saw the novel in the light of the Vietnamese madness. How the West's insatiable greed and exploitation of people broke down and corrupted their victims, altering a culture and social interactions, which had developed in harmony and interaction with an admittedly often cruel and merciless nature, but still consistent with our essential human nature, marked as it was by our pursuit of happiness and fellowship with our neighbours and next of kin. How war and greed break down both victims and perpetrators.

Every violent intervention in people's lives tends to create a devastating chaos. I read that while Coppola shot his film in a region of the Philippines a quiet little town changed into something completely different. After Coppola and his team had left the island a Minister of Social Security complained:.

Some gays with the crew fell in love with the young macho boatmen, and then it went to much younger boys, down to nine, ten, eleven years old, and the whole town got into it. By , a flourishing trade in boy prostitution tacitly supported by the community had brought economic advantages to the children and their families.

He was an avid reader and when I asked him which he considered to be the best African novel, he declared that Le Regard du roi had changed his view of the world. I read the English translation The Radiance of the King and became impressed. The novel tells the story of a white man in an unnamed African country.

In despair due to gambling debts and contempt from bigoted colonizers Clarence is searching for a legendary king residing in the heart of the African continent. Imprisoned by his own arrogance Clarence assumes himself be significantly more important and wronged than he actually is and assumes that the mighty ruler, who in secret appears to control life in the country, will be happy to take him into his service.

Clarence caught a glimpse of him during a procession in the capital, but when he is trying to get an audience in the royal palace he is told that the king had left for the interior. In the company of a beggar and two mischievous boys, Clarence starts his quest for the ever elusive king and they find themselves in an increasingly surreal landscape.

During his trek into the unknown, Clarence is forced to reveal himself from one after the other of his prejudices and delusions, until he naked and confused is sold as a slave and ends up by the king's court in the interior of Africa's jungles. The king proves to be a black youth surrounded by a remarkable radiance.

Humiliated and destitute Clarence crawls in the dust before this unspoiled, young monarch, who raises him up and presses the humiliated white man to his chest. Clarence can hear Africa's heart pounding. Camara Laye provided Heart of Darkness with an African angle. Without mentioning this novel he turned its message upside down. Although even if their state of "higher development" initially gave the Westerners an advantage over the people they colonized, this sense of superiority eventually brutalized them. The white hued Clarence becomes ennobled through an acceptance of his African origins - the living heart of Africa, its unadulterated humanity.

The so-called Congo Free State belonged between and to this Belgian monarch as his personal property and under his rule between 8 and 30 million people were brutally killed, depending on the population estimates. With astonishment Michael told to me:. The novel is outright racist! Honestly, I do not understand why it has been hailed as a compassionate defence of the Congolese while challenging Leopold's ruthless exploitation.

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The protagonist considers black people to be inferior beings. Conrad was not opposed to colonialism. However, according to him it had to be practiced virtuously, not as it was applied by the Russian rulers of his native Poland, or prompted by the murderous greed that motivated the Belgian presence in the Congo.

Conrad considered his adopted Britain as a guardian of morality and civilization and did not object to the British Empire. However, regarding black people he appears to have been consumed by a mixture of terror and fascination, largely coloured by the evolutionary racism of his time. Michael is far from being the only reader who has been distraught by the novel's obvious racism.

He was useful because he had been instructed…. The Nigerian writer and university professor Chinua Achebe did in a famous lecture define Heart of Darkness as an "offensive and deplorable book", expressing his regret that such an openly racist, albeit well-written and multi-layered, novel is being studied with approbation in schools and universities. Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth.

But the victims of racist slander who for centuries have had to live with the inhumanity it makes them heir to have always known better than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with the gifts of a Conrad. Possibly Conrad could be defended by the fact that he does not hide fear and alienation. Marlow does not only talk with occasional derision about the Congolese natives, but also merciless criticizes the colonists, with ironic distance ruminating about their ridiculous, bloated complacency and insensitive cruelty.

Marlow is a stranger, both among colonialists and natives. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman.

It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Apparently, Conrad does not despise of the Congolese. On the contrary, he expresses some kind of kinship with them.

He is reluctantly attracted by their "spontaneity", their openness. Let the fool gape and shudder - the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff - with his own inborn strength. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags - rags that would fly off at the first good shake.

No; you want a deliberate belief.


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  4. Conrad, who had been mistreated in Congo and became seriously ill, felt alienated from everything, just like Marlow:. We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.

    I was quite perplexed when I a few years ago spent some time in Kinshasa. The vast slums, dirt roads, incomprehensibly dilapidated government buildings, traffic congestion, heavily armed guards and soldiers who asked for, or rather - demanded money. People everywhere, except during the dark evenings in the diplomatic quarters, most of them very friendly.

    The constant concern born out of being a single white person in this throng of poor people, though my Congolese hosts followed me everywhere and did their best to make me feel safe, have a good time in their company and get a good impression of their city.


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    The Congolese rumba, the dancing in the evenings, poverty and chaos. I remember how the plane approached its goal above trackless jungles with villages clustered by brown tributaries, as well as the huge, leisurely moving Congo River. All this must have been even more remarkable in Conrad's time, when his steamboat chugged along between beach embankments, among huge logs, hippos and crocodiles:. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico.

    The misery of the small, shabby colonial settlements, where violence and ruthless exploitation revealed its ugly face, where people were beaten and exploited until they became mere, starving shadows of their former selves:. They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now — nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.

    The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly.

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    Gender research has examined "adventure stories" like Conrad's novel, Stanley's jingoistic descriptions of his expeditions, and above all H. Such stories are obviously masculine fantasies about a feminized Africa, like a prostrated woman's body awaiting a white male to penetrate and tame her, robbing her of pride and dignity. Racist and misogynistic stereotypes ravage unbound in depictions of naked, black women and untamed wilderness, "lush, fertile and mysterious.

    Is this typically male? Overgrown, testosterone fuelled bucks embarking on adventures into the unknown, while white women are depicted as more practical, moving around home and children, writing books, which with sharpened eyesight and psychological depth depict everyday problems. Anyone might enumerate adventurous, fearless ladies who have embarked on what the English denominate as The Quest.

    I once read a thought-provoking book by Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy , in which she pointed out that many male writers by the end of the s felt threatened by a growing number of writing and reading women. At that time, three quarters of all published novels in the US were written by women. In the smoke and whiskey-soaked gentlemen's clubs and officer messes on both sides of the Atlantic self-declared, virile gentlemen dreaded that "male" virtues were retreating from contemporary literature.

    Did not this radical feminisation of the written word represent a danger to young men growing up? A, Henty and H. Rider Haggard, to mention some of my favourite authors during my literature devouring youth. Not least Heart of Darkness was written for a male audience and published as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine. One was in decent company there. And had a good sort of public. What is Heart of Darkness all about?

    Does the novel have a clear-cut message? Does it reflect the views of the author? The American literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that Heart of Darknes s has been analysed and interpreted more than any other individual, literary work, something which is due to Conrad's "unique propensity for ambiguity. Trails that run in different directions - into the world or into the reader. Central in both novels is a ship within a macho world and with a mixture of mysticism, realism and alienation both novels drill down deep into human existence and madness, the mystery of nature and our place on earth - Herman Melville's strange Moby Dick or The Whale.

    I recently saw John Houston's film version from with Gregory Peck in the role as the crazed Captain Ahab, who with unbridled vindictiveness over the oceans pursues the immense, white sperm whale that has swallowed up his leg and damaged his mind.