"The Shadow Line" (1917) in my view is the second-greatest book ever written. (The first, of course, being The Magic Mountain, published just 7 years later but distinctly in a different era. Conrad is "transition to modernism", Mann is modernism.)
Following this up, it's #JosephConrad, #TheShadowLine.
The novel is almost entirely dialogue in direct speech, with very few descriptive or reflective passages. Here the young man digests the fact that his dream of having his own command has come true. The sentences combine abstract metaphysical elevation with the sensual concreteness in the description of the ship's body.
All these hopes will of course be entirely shattered, as they must.
Hi John. Indeed, it is #JosephConrad, a passage from the beginning of his slim novel #TheShadowLine.
A young man's vision of achievement, of mastering his own fate and doing it right, expressed before it all breaks down.
Curt Johnson - Indie Genius
the roamer
Simon Wood