bucolic

I used to keep a notebook that contained excerpts from books I admired. During the course of my reading I'd often come across a few sentences or paragraphs that I really liked and I would transcribe them into this notebook.

Today I pulled the notebook out from the closet; here is my very first entry, an INTENSE paragraph from Joseph Conrad's masterpiece "Heart of Darkness":

"Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes to late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it be."

It is still as powerful to me today as it was when I first read it back in 1991.