Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924; Essays; Literature -- History and criticism
On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress, but
a retracing of footsteps on the road of life, I had no beacons to look
for in Germany. I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole,
is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous
sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible,
provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like
a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from
it instinctively as from a threatening phantom. I believe that children
and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far
as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.
I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without
sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my voluntary
abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary after all! Each of us is
a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality
returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old
moons. Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much
to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation
of our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. By watching.
We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I said to
my eldest boy, "I can't go to bed. I am going out for a look round.
Coming?"
He was ready enough. For him, all this was part of the interesting
adventure of the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of the
hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight. I
was, indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I felt so much like a
ghost that the discovery that I could remember such material things as
the right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a
moment of wistful surprise.
The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Market Square of the
town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life. We
could see at the far end of the street a promising widening of space. At
the corner an unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at
midnight a pair of white gloves which made his big hands extremely
noticeable, turned his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding
forth in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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