Heart of Darkness, Emotion and Your Career
August 1, 2011
Everything is about emotion. The ability of someone to arouse our emotions and heart is what really drives us. Without emotion, you have nothing. We all have emotions deep within us. Inside each of us are deep emotions that many of us do not even understand. Your ability to use emotion to connect with others is something that will have a profound impact on your career. One of my favorite movies in all respects is Apocalypse Now, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness. The novel is less than 100 pages long; however, it has incredibly significant psychological messages that deal with our connection with both ourselves and the world. The book deals with the flashback of a man named Marlow working for a Belgian trading company known only as “the Company.” Marlow is sent on a steam boat up, what the reader is led to believe, is the Congo river to the Company’s remote Inner Station. As Marlow goes up the river into territory that is increasingly more and more remote, the journey takes on a psychological dimension and becomes, in effect, a quest by Marlow to understand himself and elements of his unconscious. He says “Droll thing life is-that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself–that comes too late–a crop of indistinguishable regrets.” Marlow begins to see himself as traveling into the unknown and primal reaches of the mind. The more one reads the book the more evident it becomes that the story is about a journey into the subconscious and a confrontation with one’s own self. The Inner Station is run by a man named Kurtz who trades ivory. Once he arrives at the Inner Station, Marlow is struck by the decaying facilities and the incredible and racist exploitation of the native Africans by the Europeans. Virtually every character in the novel remains nameless and is referred to simply as The Manager, The Accountant and so forth. These characters are all people who have almost completely lost their individuality in the face of the dark [Read more]
