Heart of Darkness -- another trip to Hell

This week we are reading Conrad's masterpiece, although at the end of a long, intense semester, I hope I am not doing this work an injustice. It is such a beautiful piece, but the language is so complex and the ideas Conrad wants us as readers to grapple with are at times unrelenting. As we begin the third chapter of the novel, we are about to meet the famous Kurtz at last. Presented with Satan at the end of Inferno, we are aquainted with evil. However, for me, Kurtz represents a far more disturbing vision. He is man unchecked -- man without restraint. He is the potential for evil in all of us. Conrad cloaks him near death, but the actions that he has taken prior to Marlowe's arrival linger in the mind of the reader. The jungle is the world and Kurtz is alive in it. The resolution to such pure, unbridled meglomania must reside also in the mind of man, because as Conrad so eloquently writes, the mind of man is capable of anything.