In the course of my reading, sometimes I come across quotes from classic literature that seem all too apropos of our current political climate. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the protagonist and steamship capture, Marlowe, is telling his listeners of his visit to "the Company," a brutal colonial enterprise, to receive his commission to travel into the African interior. Here is the exchange he has with one of its clerks:
A young chap wearing his hat over the left eyebrow, some clerk I suppose--there must have been clerks in the business, though the house was as still as a house in a city of the dead--came from somewhere upstairs, and led me forth. He was shabby and careless, with inkstains on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and billowy, under a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a little too early for the doctor, so I proposed a drink, and thereupon he developed a vein of joviality. As we sat over our vermouths he glorified the Company's business, and by and by I expressed casually my surpise at him not going out there. He became very cool and collected all at once. "I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples," he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolutiosn, and we rose.
Sound familiar?
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