"Why Read?" and "Under Western Eyes," Joseph Conrad

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“Why Read?

September 7, 2024

 

"To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains

of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries"

A.C. Grayling (1949-)

                                                                                                                                Against All Gods, 2012 

 

Why, you might ask, should an 83-year-old retired stockbroker read Joseph Conrad? It is not as though I do not have a choice. North of 250 thousand new titles are added every year, just in the U.S. Authors operate in what is probably the most competitive business in the world. While in school I read Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, two of Conrad’s earlier books, then popular choices for summer reading. More recently I read The Secret Agent and Victory. But I had not thought much about Conrad until recently, when a friend mentioned at lunch one day that he had written his senior thesis on him sixty-seven years ago. 

 

Unable to tell you what makes a book a classic, I know they are rare: Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy, Hugo, and others, including Conrad. Over the past few years I have re-read several, a habit lauded by the late Italian writer and journalist, Italo Calvino, who wrote in his posthumously published Why Read the Classics: “When we re-read the book in our maturity, we then discover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they come from.” Books, especially classics, are a lens through which we view our lives and make sense of the world around us. 

 

……………………………………………………

 

Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad”

 

“…they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the Eastern

borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western eyes.”

                                                                                                                                Under Western Eyes, 1911

                                                                                                                                Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

 

In 1889 Rudyard Kipling wrote the lines that open his poem “The Ballad of East and West:”

 

“Oh East is East, and West is West, and

never the twain shall meet.”

 

Kipling wrote of India, Indians and their British colonizers, but his words apply to the difference between 1911 pre-World War I Western Europe and authoritarian Tsarist Russia. Under Western Eyes tells of revolutionaries in St. Petersburg in those dozen years between the failed revolution of 1905 and the successful overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. Victor Haldin, a student, helped assassinate the brutal Minister of State, and then requests help of fellow student Razumov whom he trusts, even though he is not a revolutionary. Razumov is a young man, alone in the world, whose sole goal is a silver medal for academic studies. Haldin’s entry into his life threatened the future he had mapped out. The story is narrated by an unnamed “Teacher of Languages,” a retired English professor (a man of the West), who lives in Geneva. It moves back and forth between St. Petersburg and Geneva. It is a timeless story of trust, self-reflection, subterfuge, betrayal, love, honor, dishonor, guilt, and, ultimately, punishment and redemption.