The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway--a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."


He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them--the ship; and so is their country--the sea.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Two points: A) Marlow's line is beautiful. And it makes me think of suburban shopping malls--they are dark in a deceptive way. Just as Marlow's comment about the dark places of the earth was preceded by comments about the lights emerging in the darkness, and the light-of-sorts of the town really being a type of darkness, so shopping malls appear to be quaint, well-manicured areas for civilized people to love and linger in. In reality, though, they depict an apparent satisfaction that masks a deep problem, a pretty veneer of plastic over the uncontrollable problems of nature. Only a people with ill-formed notions of beauty would see it there.

B) And connected to the previous point, it is necessary to be wanderers, and not ones who are at home with their wandering. One's home is not the ship. The ship is a temporary place. The primary problem is (A) that people aren't wanderers--they are content, rather, with a sedentary life. The second problem is that when people wander, they wander as a vocation. The point of wandering is eventual rest.