Quotation from: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Written by: Joseph Conrad


On the tenth day, after a night spent without even dozing off once (it
had occurred to him that Antonia could not possibly have ever loved
a being so impalpable as himself), the solitude appeared like a great
void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he
hung suspended by both hands, without fear, without surprise, without
any sort of emotion whatever. Only towards the evening, in the
comparative relief of coolness, he began to wish that this cord would
snap. He imagined it snapping with a report as of a pistol--a sharp,
full crack. And that would be the end of him. He contemplated that
eventuality with pleasure, because he dreaded the sleepless nights in
which the silence, remaining unbroken in the shape of a cord to which he
hung with both hands, vibrated with senseless phrases, always the same
but utterly incomprehensible, about Nostromo, Antonia, Barrios, and
proclamations mingled into an ironical and senseless buzzing. In the
daytime he could look at the silence like a still cord stretched to
breaking-point, with his life, his vain life, suspended to it like a
weight.

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