Quotation from: Lord Jim

Written by: Joseph Conrad


To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships
he was just Jim--nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he
was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had
as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a
fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave
suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to
another--generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a
seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is
good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good
order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but
inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in
Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia--and in each of
these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his
keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports
and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle
village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a
word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as
one might say--Lord Jim.

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