-- part name: Click for further discussion of Dante allusions.
----- HyperTalk script -----
on mouseUp
go to card id 6461
end mouseUp
-- part contents for card part 1
----- text -----
This condition of unfulfilment is matched in the spiritual state of the shades described in Dante's
-- part contents for card part 2
----- text -----
Inferno
-- part contents for card part 3
----- text -----
and in HEART OF DARKNESS by the members of the
-- part contents for card part 4
----- text -----
members of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition: "Their talk was . . . the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage . . . To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe" (p. 50 in Bantam edition; pages 98-99 in Signet Classic edition).
A second passage in HEART OF DARKNESS seems also to have been in Eliot's mind, Marlow's account of his fight against death: "It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory . . . in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary . . . a vision of greyness without form," from which he emerges to find life "like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire" (p. 119 in Bantam; p. 148 in Signet).