Alternate Ending to Heart of Darkness

For all those that felt that Conrad did not end the story “right” with Marlow actually giving the truth, here is a possible ending in which he gives the truth to the Intended, coming in right after she asks him to give her Kurtz’s last words, and returning right before the perspective returns to the Narrator.

“I could feel the Darkness rising up, the fearful thing from the past colliding solidly into the present, trying to connect and re-live itself, to continue itself to infinity. Then I felt the fear, the pain, the insanity, the thing which had changed the memory of this Shade wrapped in the shadows into something else, something that would become the Kurtz I thought I knew, from the amount I could glean from the instants I felt his presence, this being, that had left the earth long before I would hear of him in the Darkness.

“Then I turned to her, and told her the feeling that was all around. The rising thing that had rose up in Kurtz at his last, ‘The Horror, the Horror.’

“She looked at me first as if this was impossible, that would not his beloved’s name be the only thing he could have thought at his lowest? Then, she changed, to question why I would commit such a crime as to give the painful, sharp Truth, which cut through all veils, and then her, too, like a bright, flashing saber. At last, she finished with understanding, as if she actually understood what Kurtz had meant in his view from and into the abyss, that the only horror was that he could not be there with her then in the present.

“She then turned, lost in thought, back into the shadowy recesses of the room, to dwell on her now seemingly complete memory of her devoted.

“I turned and left after as she did, horrified at what I had done, my mind petrified in what I could have done…”

Inoculation by Susan Donnelly

Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while,

instead of sin.  Boston was rife with it.

Not being ill himself, thank Providence,

but one day asking his slave, Onesimus,

if he’d ever had the pox.  To which Onesimus replied,

“Yes and No.”  Not insubordinate

or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps

musing, as one saying to another:

“Consider how a man

can take inside all manner of disease

and still survive.”

Then, graciously, when Mather asked again:

My mother bore me in the southern wild.

She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived

to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.

           

This is such a rich poem. It is hilarious. But maybe I see that because I find satire and irony funny. And this poem is full of it. It seems every two lines or so, there is a spike that jabs at the point of life, and poor Cotton Mather is at the tail end of every joke. However, perhaps the most ironic point about it, and the subject of the poem, is the slave Onesimus. Biblically, Onesimus was a slave that ran away from his master, and encountered and became good friends with Paul the Apostle. Why he becomes worth notice in the Bible is because he becomes “useful” to Paul and the early Church. Here is the quote that mentions him.

“Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. It is as none other than Paul—an old man and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus— that I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me.” Philemon 1:8-10

The ironic thing is that in Greek, onesimus means useful. So ‘formerly Useful was useless to you, but now Useful has become useful to you and to me.’ This is all meant to illustrate the fact that Onesimus to Mather was all that his name implied: Useful. It’s the end that brings this home, to be freed young only to become a ‘useful’ slave, and becoming an example to free others.

The White Man's Burden by Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White Man's burden---
     Send forth the best ye breed---
Go bind your sons to exile
     To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
     On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
     Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
     In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
     And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
     An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
     And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
     The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
     And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
     The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
     Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
     No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
     The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
     The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
     And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
     And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
     The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
     (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
     Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
     Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
     To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
     By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
     Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
     Have done with childish days--
The lightly proffered laurel,
     The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
     Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
     The judgment of your peers!

What a poem that can be interpreted (or misinterpreted) in so many ways. One, on the surface, can understand this poem as a promotion of imperialize or colonization. I, in my interpretation, disagree. I see this poem not as a promotion, but instructions once did (perhaps it would have been better to call it ‘The More Fortunate’s Burden’ to avoid certain stigmas an confusion, but it does not have the same ring, nor were there the stigmas stigmas back then.) Nowhere in the poem does it say that one should go out and capture people and lands. The closest it comes to promoting this is "Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child." and "The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go make them with your living." However, the people are newly caught, not to be caught, and the new land does not have the roads and ports for they are not created yet. This is post-acquisition, not pre. 

            So what is one to do with a newly obtained land? That is what the poem is driving at, what one is obligated to do, not to abuse, subjugate, or misuse, but to lift up, empower, and free. Kipling even warns that it will not be easy, that the natives will probably hate anyone involved with their freeing, but his allusion to the Hebrews in “‘Why brought ye us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?’” assures that it’s for the best, to give them voice in the first place. To thanklessly fight the maladies of the ‘un-developed’ world will be reward in itself. In a way, he is almost daring a power to see if they can take up new land, do the right thing, and not get lost in persecution and slavery.

Mr Fear by Lawrence Raab

He follows us, he keeps track.
Each day his lists are longer.
Here, death. And here,
something like it.

Mr. Fear, we say in our dreams
what do you have for me tonight?
And he looks through his sack,
his black sack of troubles.

Maybe he smiles when he finds
the right one. Maybe he's sorry.
Tell me, Mr. Fear,
what must I carry

away from your dream.
Make it small, please
Let it fit in my pocket,
let it fall through

the hole in my pocket.
Fear, let me have
a small brown bat
and a purse of crickets

like the ones I heard
singing last night
out there in the stubbly field
before I slept, and met you.

            What I love about this poem is it reminds me so much of Ray Bradbury’s themes on fear. Bradbury is perhaps one of my favorite authors, and reading of Mr. Fear and “a small brown bat and a purse of crickets” brings to mind “The Next in Line” or The Halloween Tree. Mr. Fear knowing what scares us, always bringing the future or the past (“like the ones I heard last night”) out to frighten us about what is out in the dark (“stubbly field”) or what is inside.

More specific to the poem, I find it clever how the author personifies those nightmares that happen, when something that happened during the day (“He follows us”) or an old memory (“he keeps track”) resurfaces as a bad dream at night (“what do you have for me tonight?”) Thankfully, we mostly forget the dreams or mind makes up during the night (“Let it fit in my pocket, let it fall through the hole in my pocket”) but occasionally we remember those seemingly innocent things of the day turn absurdly sinister at night that only we understand.