Word: congo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...widely in fact as well as fancy. His career as a young seaman took him to exotic places, and the cargo of perceptions he brought home sustained him as an aging author. His travels outward were then mirrored by his journey inward. Once, Conrad had chugged laboriously up the Congo River to reach the heart of darkness; later he realized that this destination could be reached much more rapidly. All that was needed was introspection...
...Returned to England in late January of 1891, Conrad was now back at square one, only older. Possibly, his experiences in the Congo turned him into a writer, or at least gave him a sense of the indifference and negligibility of human life which he could shape into his fiction. But it was only one ingredient. What he had experienced as a boy in Poland, as a child in his parents' exile, then in his years as a seaman and later in the waters around Borneo-all of these episodes taken together created what Conrad knew about human depravity...
...suggest that ... In the sense that he had learned not to give himself to uncertain plans, he may have come to the knowledge that a literary career was possible ... Ultimately, the Congo episode, which became so momentous in his later work, may have been no more than the kind of defeat which brought him to the brink of existence, his own rather than that of civilization. At that edge, where he had to stare into the abyss, he saw himself drowning, and the question for him was whether he was worth saving...
...pictures of war and displacement in Congo...
...powers, including Germany and Japan, agreed to renounce war as an instrument of national policy; and former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who was named posthumously as lau reate in 1961, while his U.N. peace keeping force soldiered on in the bloody morass of the Belgian Congo...