Israel is the Heart of Darkness
“The horror, the horror”
At the end of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the protagonist, the sailor Marlow, returns to Europe from the Congo a disillusioned and bitter man.
On the Congo River, Marlow had come face to face with the inherent insanity of the so-called “civilized world” represented by ivory tradesman Mr. Kurtz.
Kurtz’s descent into madness isn’t the result of him being drunk on the power he appears to wield over natives and pilgrims. It is, in fact, the only rational response a human being can have to the brutal truth at the heart of colonization.
In Marlow’s world, language effectively dies with the eloquent Kurtz, who is reduced to whispering, with his dying breaths, those infamous words “the horror, the horror”.
Our collective descent into madness
I may be wrong, but it certainly appears to me like something very fundamental is changing in the world. Like we are experiencing an international shift in consciousness, a collective existential crisis even.
The West’s sense of itself as being the peak of civilization, the tip of the arrow of humanity as it slices through the dark on its arc of progress, feels like it is crumbling.
