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“https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oo7VlD66ISM

As Churchill said, “Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Let’s take this to heart over the time ahead

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Closer ... closer ~

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White supremacy is built on inferior white men blaming innocent people for their corruption.

😂🤪😱

The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad, 1919

I was in Los Angeles recently and visited this incredible bookstore, The Last Bookstore, where I found a first print edition of The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad.

When I lived abroad I read all of the Joseph Conrad novels I could find. His writing is incredibly difficult, deeply psychological and introspective. The characters live out many (mis)adventures in their thoughts, in their dark hearts. Many of you undoubtedly read “The Heart of Darkness” in high school or university. It’s one of Conrad’s most well know works. But he has so many others, and all of them are incredibly complicated journeys into the hearts of many people as they reach for redemption or ruin. I read him to prevent losing my ability to speak English overseas, and I was at least partially successful in that endeavor, though I will admit, perhaps my heart spent a chapter or a book too many in the West Indies, the South Pacific, on foreign seas, going up rivers into countries unknown, or living out the many wars fought in jungles, deserts or the Malay Archipelago.

I thought The Golden Arrow would be about a gunrunner at sea, but it’s a romance novel! It’s a love triangle, or a love rectangle, or a love pentagon, with many men fighting for the love of a singular woman, the beautiful and very rich widower, Doña Rita, who inherits a veritable museum in Paris. Our man, the main character, is never introduced by name, only by his fake name “Monsieur George” or “Don George” or as Rita sometimes calls him “amigo George.”

Almost the entirety of this book happens in several rooms in a house in Marseilles, France, where Doña Rita funds a loyalist movement for the King of Spain, and Monsieur George transports guns for her to her Carlist loyalists. The Arrow of Gold is a piece of jewelry that Doña Rita wears in her flowing hair, and she gives it to Monsieur George as a sign of her love. What a woman Doña Rita is!

I admit that I’ve become so fond of the scent of antique books, the feel of pages over a hundred years old, even the font and typeset of these old books comforts me. I sit down with a book like this, touch my fingers to the paper, breath in the scent of pages printed with stories so long ago, open or close the spine carefully, and drink while I read, like a ceremony or an incantation I cast for the author, for the characters, for hundreds of years gone by, for simple joy! I lose myself in these amazing books. I lost myself on a sofa sitting close to Doña Rita, and I too felt the sorrow that amigo George felt, losing her shiny Arrow of Gold at Sea in a wild tempest (perhaps a metaphor for the war).

Love stories are always about loss and redemption, about how we lose the best of ourselves and everything we held dearly in our hearts. Joseph Conrad takes you into the light and darkness of the soul on his adventures, but I feel like I always lose some part of me along the journey, and isn’t that what life is all about?