laststandonzombieisland

As a kid I dearly loved Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (O.K., so I was an odd kid). The horribly grim tale of Charles Marlow’s trip down the 19th century Congo to see Mr. Kurtz was chilling and I felt like I could almost taste the dark water. My favorite character was the slightly fractured Russian simply called the “Harlequin” in the book.

When I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time as a teenager, I was likely the only one in the room who had read Conrad and found myself jumping up and down when I ran across Dennis Hoppers character.

Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll… uh… well, you’ll say “hello” to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you. He won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you”… I mean I’m… no, I can’t… I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s… he’s a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas…

For those who didn’t know, Hopper’s character was also based on Sean Flynn, an American freelance photojournalist who disappeared in 1970 in Cambodia and to this day has never been seen again.

Just thought I’d share. By the way, here is a link to a free audio download of The Heart of Darkness for sticking around through the end of this post.