Page 16 - Failed Experiment

A Failed Experiment

This passage from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness captures some
of this mood of menace. Marlow is looking out on the African shore
and observes to his companions: “…this strange world of plants, and
water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble
peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention…When you have to attend to things of that sort,
to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality – the reality, I tell you
– fades. The inner truth is hidden, luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the
same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey
tricks…”

I once wrote, after exiting Armstrongism, that to me Ambassador
College (and Armstrongism in general) was like a certain genre of
Hollywood gothic horror movie – like “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The
Wicker Man” or some of the Star Trek episodes. The protagonist
enters some small tight-knit, remote community and the good
townspeople seem to be happy and smiling and unctuously benevolent
and he is taken in by it. (“Just look at the smiling faces in our college
yearbook!!”) He notices some small but unsettling oddities in this
community but overall these people seem to be a good lot. And then
late one night he is awakened by strange, eerie, distant chanting and he
slips out into the mist and moonlight to see where it is coming
from. To his horror and fascination, he discovers these people, who
seemed so good on the surface, are congregated naked in the darkness
swaying around a bonfire worshipping something noisome. He realizes
his life is in jeopardy but by some entrancing spell, some fascination
with dark and unmentionable things, he cannot make himself flee and
succumbs.

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