Post #112: The Shadow-Line

18 May 2024

“One goes on, excited, amused, taking the hard luck and the good luck together—the kicks and the halfpence, as the saying is. Yes. One goes on. And the time, too, goes on—till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of youth, too, must be left behind. This is the period of life in which such moments are likely to come: moments of boredom, of weariness, of dissatisfaction. One day I was perfectly all right, and the next, everything was gone—glamour, flavour, interest, contentment, everything. The past eighteen months, so full of new and varied experience, appeared a dreary, prosaic waste of days. I felt—how shall I express it?—that there was no truth to be got out of them.”

—Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line*

     Conrad identifies the encroachments of the shadow-line upon our lives with the end of youth, but it seems to me that there is much more to it than that. True, times of transition between the stages of life are especially liable, and perhaps none more than the “the twilight region between youth and maturity” (wherever you may be inclined to locate the line) [26, 106]. Even so, the shadow in question can fall upon any of us, I would say, when a way of living that once came easily and naturally loses its appeal, sometimes for no very clear external reason at all.

     These are dangerous moments that can see us sinking into hopelessness and despond, or that might prompt us into rash and ill-considered, at times outright disastrous ventures. Other times the shadow-line may take concrete shape in great collective upheavals, or in dire personal trials. When Conrad wrote his story down in the autumn of 1915, after many years of pondering it, the occasion was the enlistment of his son Borys in the Great War. For the still-youngish seaman in the story, the appearance of the shadow-line led first to giving up his berth as a first mate, out of sheer listlessness, then suddenly finding himself propelled, as if by the Fates themselves, back to the sea and into a harrowing first command. For you or for me it may take another form yet, but it seems that nobody escapes it forever, and probably not just once in one’s lifetime either.

     What exactly are we missing, one might ask, when a chapter in life, perhaps rich in experience and agreeable in circumstance, nonetheless seems in retrospect but a waste of days, as per the epigraph, and untruthful to boot? What exactly is it we are looking for? Conrad drops a few hints: “A great discouragement fell on me. A spiritual drowsiness. There was nothing original, nothing new, startling, informing to expect from the world: no opportunities to find out something about oneself, no wisdom to acquire, no fun to enjoy.” [23] What is lacking, then, is not comfort or commodious living, and perhaps not even variety of experience; what is missing is the orientation towards greater self-knowledge and a more profound understanding, a prospect of deeper discoveries about ourselves and the world than ordinary day-to-day life affords—a sense of vital intensity, of enthusiasm (literally, embodying the divine), of adventures to be had not just in the trivial sense of this or that diversion or petty pleasure, but of an exciting journey worth undertaking even if it promises or proves to be arduous and frustrating.

     The problem, in other words, is not in the what or the how of life so much as in the why, as I’ve had occasion to observe several times before when discussing Frankl and Nietzsche (#34, #52, #100). Why this, and why now? If there is no good answer forthcoming when the mood strikes you to ask, you may have a problem. A sense of time running out, of the sands of opportunity running through your fingers, often plays a part: thus the narrator in our tale senses his youth drawing to a close and wonders where that might leave him. What to do with the last vestiges of youthful zeal and vigor when they are wearing thin? Surely the precious remainder should not just be frittered away thoughtlessly on the mundane aspects of everyday living. Or that is how things are bound to look, anyway, when the shadow-line crosses your life. What greater purpose, what significance, what meaning to it all? Once you ask, you will need a lived answer; mere reflection won’t make it go away.

     How central a place one might wish to assign to Joseph Conrad, or to this story of his, in negotiating these straights of life, is for each of us to decide for ourselves. Whatever other readers might see, or fail to see, in Conrad’s writing, I find much solace in his pages, and plenty to suggest how one might best get through trying times—or get through them at all, well done or not. What such times call for, first and foremost, is a reorientation towards one’s guiding stars, or perhaps better, a recollection—and a ship as it were, your ship, which may or may not come with sails (though Conrad saw much to recommend them over steam), and which you may or may not be called either to steer or command, but which must, above and beyond such incidentals, be an “object of responsibility and devotion that is more yours to care for than anything else in the world” [40].

     No ship of these dimensions can be properly manned by anyone all on his own; you need a crew beside you, or at least one other companion when false friends fail, as is inevitable, to come through for you in the hour of need, or real ones drop by the wayside for this reason or that (malaria, in the story). “There is an infinite distance between one and none,” as Nietzsche observes of companionship in Schopenhauer as Educator (see par. 16b, p. 17, in my translation). Even a single truly likeminded friend makes all the difference in the world. To do without may not, in a very few and exceptional cases, be altogether beyond human strength and endurance; but it is not something one should ever put to the test recklessly.

     The moment of truth will demand, moreover, a set of skills and tools adequate for making your contribution, whatever it may be—thus the simple, hardy virtues of seamanship, in Conrad’s telling, but something else, with few limits on the human imagination, according to our sundry and several situations. “The road would be long. All roads are long that lead to one’s heart’s desire. But this road my mind’s eye could see on a chart, professionally, with all its complications and difficulties, yet simple enough in its way. One is a seaman or one is not. And I had no doubt of being one.” [44]** If the sea is not your element, fair enough; but some provisions for the long journey remain indispensable, depending on its particular challenges and requirements.

     But what of the myriad doubts and insecurities to which our human condition exposes us? What to do with those, pray-tell, and with all the accumulated fears and failings of a lifetime, with our spells of ill fortune and their lingering echoes, and above all, with the frightful feelings of inadequacy and diffuse depths of remorse and guilt to which our young captain in the tale is so devastatingly prone, though his conduct, so far as we know, was blameless enough?*** All this must be “stood up to,” as Captain Giles, who was instrumental in getting the still-young man his command in the first place, reminds the no-longer-young man at the end of the tale [131-32]. The confirmed captain, having survived his initiatory ordeal, arrives at the requisite attitude, we may suppose, when he decides to turn right back seawards upon a mere night’s sleep (after he has spent some seventeen days on deck, we are told, and forty hours without rest [128]). The Indian Ocean that he was so cruelly prevented from reaching on his first attempt is calling him still, and though much humbled, he is not, at last, cowed. (“You aren’t faint-hearted?” Captain Giles asks him. “God only knows,” he answers [132].)

     Yet what bitter self-reproaches along the way—not only during the darkest days of the cursed journey (“I feel as if all my sins had found me out… I always suspected that I might be no good, and here is proof positive” [107–08]), but all the way to the bitter-sweet end, when he watches his faithful crew, on the verge of death from malaria, being evacuated from the ship back at Singapore harbor, whence he had set out so hopefully not even three weeks earlier. “They passed under my eyes one after another—each of them an embodied reproach of the bitterest kind, till I felt a sort of revolt wake up in me.” [129] The revolt presages, perhaps, the beginnings of reconciliation with his ill-fated first voyage: for all his possible faults (and what he blames himself for most bitterly, the business of the quinine, was hardly so grave an error as he made it out to be), he has, with their united help, succeeded in bringing them all to shore, in bad enough shape admittedly, but alive nonetheless, despite everything. (All who set out with him, at any rate: a steward died of cholera on shore before their departure.)

     The ideal of command, at sea especially, has long presumed such lofty, not to say inhuman, standards of imperturbable fortitude and self-possession that the narrator’s fierce self-recriminations may sound less far-fetched to the seaman’s than to the landlubber’s ear [86, 92, 102]. Yet whose soul could bear quite such exacting self-examination? The young captain blames himself mercilessly for shrinking from what must be faced on deck [87, 89, 107–108], as if he were no more than a disgraceful shirker of his duties—yet in sober fact he spends practically all of his nearly three-week ordeal just there. No, the weakness or sickness of soul that causes his supposed sins to bear down upon him with such “invincible anguish” [86, 105, 109] runs deeper, surely, than his actual failings, as it perhaps does in all of us. Nor is he ever at much risk of going mad, even when his fears in that direction run most wild [93, 100]. “I didn’t know in what soundness of mind exactly consisted,” he recollects, adding for good measure, “and what a delicate and, upon the whole, unimportant matter it was” [21].

     And then there is luck—of which we all need far too much for our moral (and mortal) comfort, since all-too often everything comes down to this most unsettling of variables, the elusive ingredient of good fortune or bad, the descent of grace upon us or its departure, whether real or imagined. Not fun to think about, but there is nothing for it: we must reckon with Lady Fortuna’s fickle might even if her mysterious ways are beyond all prediction and calculation (#109).

     That much for the price and the manner of paying it. But what of the prize? The reward of our troubles—not to be aimed for too directly (#111), yet sure to come whenever it is due—is growth and maturation, that tempering of character, as the narrator puts it [129], of which we are so often unaware when it is happening, but without which we would remain forever children. Crises always try and sometimes destroy us; but they strengthen us too and make us who we are, for better or for worse. We may nonetheless continue to carry with us a yearning for the lighter days of youth, and for the infantile aspect of life more generally, but it will not do to indulge it unduly. If, as more or less adult denizens of the 21st century, we are at risk of slackening in that conviction, then there is no more urgent reminder to be wished for than in Conrad’s writing. (Which is not to say that the charm and innocence of youth and its agreeable illusions were ever lost on Conrad [65].)

     “The truth is that one must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad,” Captain Giles observes at the end of the book when he is taking his good-bye [131–32]. “You will learn soon how not to be faint-hearted. A man has got to learn everything—that’s what so many of those youngsters don’t understand.”

     “Well, I am no longer a youngster,” the narrator replies, both humbled and wizened by his encounter with the shadow-line.

     “You do look older—it’s a fact,” Captain Giles concedes.

*Pages 3–4, 5, 7 in the World’s Classics paperback, edited by Jeremy Hawthorn (OUP 1991). References in brackets are to this edition.

**Conrad’s unshakable faith in “the blessed simplicity” of the traditional seaman’s “point of view on life,” and the immensity of its betrayal by treason or indifference [53, 62], runs like a red thread not only through this book but through most of his writing. It had become, even in his own lifetime, an old-fashioned position to defend, what with the inroads of the steam-engine, by sea as by land, having already reduced sailing ships to desperate holdouts against the winds of change [4, 45]. But hold out Conrad would, with all the might of his pen, to the very end of his life, touchingly tenacious in his seaman’s faith: “The ship, this ship, our ship, the ship we serve, is the moral symbol of our life. A ship has to be respected, actually and ideally; her merit, her innocence, are scared things.” (From “Well Done (1918)” in Notes on Life and Letters, J. M. Dent 1921, p. 188, with ample equivalents elsewhere, perhaps most explicitly in The Mirror of the Sea.) And even more than a symbol: a sailing ship was to Conrad a school of life. What might take its place in an age of steam, or worse, an age where ships have been reduced to mere machines and assembled material, he could not say.

     A hundred years on from his death, one might envy Conrad the undimmed clarity of his vision (“The sea the only world that counted, and the ships the test of manliness, of temperament, of courage and fidelity, and of love” [40]). If we have anything to look to that is quite as robustly lovely, as unerringly tasteful, and as untouched by the vagaries of time, as a truly fine sailing ship imagined by Conrad (“one of those creatures whose mere existence is enough to awaken an unselfish delight, etc.” [49–50]), I don’t know what it might be. But perhaps that is to approach things from the wrong angle: we do not need a collective or a traditional answer, just our own “ship” making concrete for us something that is worth serving, bowing before, and sacrificing to. Conrad spoke of the “undying regard” for his crew that was, for him, “the greatest memory of all” [xl, 100]. But there are many worthy ships and crews that sail the seas of life, if we only abstract a little from the water, and we all get a choice of vessel and proper destination, though always constrained by circumstances, of course, and sometimes pinched most painfully. Finding your way aboard the right ship, alongside fitting companions and with suitable coordinates to steer for, aye, therein lies the challenge, not in petty questions of class or tonnage, or whether she is sufficiently impressive to the eyes of others! Your ship must be beautiful to you, and the journey worth making; all else is secondary.

***I am in no position to pronounce, nautically speaking, on whether the “bond of the sea” should have swayed the young captain as it did when Burns made his desperate plea not to be left behind ashore, or whether it was an error of judgment on his part to set out with an incapacitated first mate [70–71]. It was not, at any rather, what the narrator blames himself for. He is preoccupied, almost to the point of moral obsession, with the supposed gravity of his lapse in not double-checking the quinine supplies, even though he had no reason to do so since his kindly and trustworthy doctor friend had examined the medical chest and certified it [71, 80]: “The person I could never forgive was myself. The seed of everlasting remorse was sown in my breast. No confessed criminal was ever so oppressed by his sense of guilt. I was crushed by the infinite depth of reproach.” [95–96]

In this he was quite mistaken, however. None of the crew murmur in the slightest, or even glance reproachfully [96, 100], and Burns dismisses his new captain’s morbid self-reproach out of hand, as “very foolish,” partly with the old captain’s wickedness in mind [95], but also because he is a seasoned sailor and capable first mate with a sure sense of the practical, despite his wild side [63]. The profound moral shock that Burns suffered [61] was not owed to the admitted weirdness of his person [101], but on the contrary, to the fact that his sense of right and wrong is quite normal and sound enough to be appalled by an encounter with real evil. There may be greater sins and crimes, at sea as on land, than for a captain to wish, out of sheer spite, for a fine ship that has been entrusted to his care to go down with all hands; but thinking in terms of the nautical ethos that is so central to Conrad’s moral vision, it would be hard to imagine a worse breach of trust. Thus the narrator muses [62], “That man had been in all essentials but his age just such a man as myself. Yet the end of his life was a complete act of treason, the betrayal of a tradition that seemed to me as imperative as any guide on earth could be.”