“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

How would you interpret Conrad’s infamous quote “The horror, the horror”?

I’ve always been enthralled by this Conradian take on man’s disease, his vagrant misdirections and the values he scrawls on the blank moral world around him. I think it’s wrong to conceive of the Heart of Darkness as a safe literary destination; nor can it be considered a cliche. It is a Conradian trait to give readers nauseating bouts of fever, of being swamped by sentences and sun alike…

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.

The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances …

Penguin, with their trademark assiduity, has recently commissioned Phil Hale to paint 6 titles of Conrad. I think they capture the temperament of the book best. Here’s an evolution of Conrad’s covers below: