Is it I?

Approaching Two Harbors, Catalina Island.

 

Will spring never come?  What a winter this has been, in so many ways.  I can't wait to put it behind me.  I'm thinking of taking off for California for a while to break the spell of this bleak season.  Stroll around Santa Barbara and Isla Vista, drive out to Gaviota, do some surfing.  Then down to Channel Islands and rent a sailboat, something like a Catalina 28.  I used to sail one of those a lot when I was in high school and college. Sail out to the Channel Islands, maybe go all the way out to Santa Barbara Island, from there maybe down to good old Santa Catalina Island -- island of romance!  Then sail past San Clemente Island down to San Diego, wave at North Island. 
Yeah, well, dream on, Wanda. I've got too many obligations and responsibilities, too many people relying on me, to just take off like that.  Here I am and here I'll stay.

 Sometimes, reading websites and blogs absolutely discourages me.  I was reading one where some guy said he had tried to read Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim but couldn't get through it because it was too difficult and poorly written.  Sigh.  Joseph Conrad a poor writer?  Words fail. Civilization is crumbling before our eyes.  Lord Jim is a novel every person should read, and, I think, most especially youths -- by that I mean young men or boys on the verge of manhood. 
How can it be that a novel that has been admired, enjoyed and learned from for well over a century, one of the most popular in the English language, cannot now be understood?
I don't mean to belittle the person who couldn't read or understand this novel; it's not his fault.  I do mean to express my dismay at the dying of my civilization.  The previous generation failed to preserve and pass it on.  Any civilization is at most three, but more likely just two, generations thick.  It's like looking at a wildfire.  On the ground you see a wall of flames that could, for all you know, be infinitely thick and deep.  But looking at those flames from the air, you see that they are merely a thin line.  That, to me, is how civilization is. But it is not formed of flames, but of a thin line of parents and grandparents, sometimes also great-grandparents -- but no more -- who constantly hand forward to their children and grandchildren the values, folkways, religious beliefs, wisdom, knowledge, way of life -- all that comprises a culture and civilization.  Maybe you could compare it to a relay race in which the baton handed off is civilization itself.  And the last two generations have simply failed to preserve and pass on Western Civilization to the next generations.  So it is not the fault of the person who can't understand Lord Jim that he can't do so.  It is the fault of those who failed, didn't even try, didn't think it was important, to teach him how to understand it, how to read it, how to appreciate its writing; how to tackle difficult, demanding subjects, persevere even in something so trivial as reading a novel, trivial compared to the other demands life will place on each of us.  Demands which, as Lord Jim examines, we may fail at. In the pitiless glare of life's challenges, we may discover that we are not much, that we are cowards, that we run away.  And after such knowledge, as they say, what forgiveness?  How can you forgive yourself when you have learned who you really are?  That we are all Lord Jim.
Of course, many will never face such challenges and go through life in ignorance of their own true natures.  But they may wonder how they would behave under supreme stress.  They may imagine they would be heroes, brave, resourceful, unafraid.  But Lord Jim whispers to them that that will not be so.

“There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention―that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary―the sunshine, the memories, the future―which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim