Word: conrad
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...assessments of the economy too. Reagan is well aware that the recession has reinforced a widespread impression that he is indifferent to the sufferings of the poor and unemployed; some 300 demonstrators drove home the point last week by assembling in the bitter cold outside Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel and chanting, "We want jobs!" At the Percy dinner inside, the President told his partisan audience: "In the long run, economic growth will put our unemployed back to work, revive idle factories and open new doors of opportunity. But in the short run, our people continue to hurt...
Along the way, he seems to have met everyone. He knew Stravinsky, he knew Picasso. He knew Joseph Conrad and Gertrude Stein. He knew fine wine, he knew fine art. Most of all, it seems, he knew women; his two-volume autobiography is almost as much a recounting of amorous conquests as musical triumphs. "It is said of me," he once told an interviewer, "that when I was young I divided my time impartially among wine, women and song. I deny this categorically. Ninety percent of my interests were women...
...Henreid. Henreid is still alive. So, for that matter, is Ronald Reagan, whom Jack Warner originally wanted for the part of Victor. (All wrong, too American, as wholesome as a quart of milk.) But Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains and Conrad Veidt are all dead. The movie they made has achieved a peculiar state of permanence. It has become something more than a classic. It is practically embedded in the collective American unconscious...
Suddenly the Soviet Union demands our scrutiny again: the deep chasm peered at impolitely by a world that, in every age, has found it impenetrable, benumbing. When Joseph Conrad wrote about the place, he called his novel Under Western Eyes because he wanted his readers to understand that his story was being told by an outsider, meaning that no non-Russian could ever hope to see into that particular heart of darkness with any clarity or certainty. It is the same now. With Leonid Brezhnev gone, where are Western eyes to look, at the man or at the space...
...what exactly was it? What lies in the chasm, which, after all, should be a lot easier to comprehend than when Conrad was searching it? In 1517, the German Ambassador brought the West its first description of a Russian ruler: "He surpasses all the monarchs of the whole world. He uses his authority as much over ecclesiastics as laymen, and holds unlimited control over the lives and property of all his subjects: not one of his counselors has sufficient authority to dare to oppose him." Was he describing a Tsar or a Stalin? The power alone is not unfathomable...