feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Lord Jim/section_20_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapter 21
feat_summary_id: chapter 21
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim30.asp", "summary": "Marlow starts the second part of Jim's story with a description of Patusan, an extremely isolated island in Malaya that is controlled by warring forces. Patusan has a trading post owned by Stein and presently managed by Cornelius, a cunning, dishonest, and wretched man. Stein wants to send Jim to Patusan to replace Cornelius. When Marlow tells Jim the plan, he does not express his feelings, but it is quite clear that he likes the idea. Marlow then flashes forward two years. He goes to visit Jim in Patusan and is delighted to see how well his friend is doing as the resident manager of the outpost. It is obvious that Jim feels successful; he has mastered his self-defeating romanticism.", "analysis": "Notes The choice of Patusan as Jim's place of rehabilitation is significant. It is an island so remote that most merchants do not even know about it. It offers the perfect setting for Jim to be able to live without fear of discovery; here there will be no mention of the Patna. The description of Patusan is beautiful. It is a small island divided by a valley separating two hills facing each other. The fissure between the hills symbolizes the split in Jim's being, his romantic side vs. his real side. The setting of the Patusan isle also has a symbolic meaning. The fissured hill with the moon floating out of the chasm is the symbol of Jim's fate; he is to be lonely and separated not only from his own kind but also from his own self. But he will leave his earthly failings behind and start afresh in this unearthly place."}
text: 
  'I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan?' Marlow resumed,
  after a silence occupied in the careful lighting of a cigar. 'It does
  not matter; there's many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of
  a night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere
  of its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to the
  astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,
  weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of its
  light--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering. Thus with Patusan. It
  was referred to knowingly in the inner government circles in Batavia,
  especially as to its irregularities and aberrations, and it was known
  by name to some few, very few, in the mercantile world. Nobody, however,
  had been there, and I suspect no one desired to go there in person,
  just as an astronomer, I should fancy, would strongly object to being
  transported into a distant heavenly body, where, parted from his earthly
  emoluments, he would be bewildered by the view of an unfamiliar heavens.
  However, neither heavenly bodies nor astronomers have anything to do
  with Patusan. It was Jim who went there. I only meant you to understand
  that had Stein arranged to send him into a star of the fifth magnitude
  the change could not have been greater. He left his earthly failings
  behind him and what sort of reputation he had, and there was a totally
  new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon. Entirely
  new, entirely remarkable. And he got hold of them in a remarkable way.
  
  'Stein was the man who knew more about Patusan than anybody else. More
  than was known in the government circles I suspect. I have no doubt he
  had been there, either in his butterfly-hunting days or later on, when
  he tried in his incorrigible way to season with a pinch of romance the
  fattening dishes of his commercial kitchen. There were very few places
  in the Archipelago he had not seen in the original dusk of their being,
  before light (and even electric light) had been carried into them for
  the sake of better morality and--and--well--the greater profit, too.
  It was at breakfast of the morning following our talk about Jim that he
  mentioned the place, after I had quoted poor Brierly's remark: "Let him
  creep twenty feet underground and stay there." He looked up at me with
  interested attention, as though I had been a rare insect. "This could be
  done, too," he remarked, sipping his coffee. "Bury him in some sort,"
  I explained. "One doesn't like to do it of course, but it would be the
  best thing, seeing what he is." "Yes; he is young," Stein mused. "The
  youngest human being now in existence," I affirmed. "Schon. There's
  Patusan," he went on in the same tone. . . . "And the woman is dead
  now," he added incomprehensibly.
  
  'Of course I don't know that story; I can only guess that once before
  Patusan had been used as a grave for some sin, transgression, or
  misfortune. It is impossible to suspect Stein. The only woman that
  had ever existed for him was the Malay girl he called "My wife the
  princess," or, more rarely, in moments of expansion, "the mother of my
  Emma." Who was the woman he had mentioned in connection with Patusan I
  can't say; but from his allusions I understand she had been an educated
  and very good-looking Dutch-Malay girl, with a tragic or perhaps only a
  pitiful history, whose most painful part no doubt was her marriage with
  a Malacca Portuguese who had been clerk in some commercial house in
  the Dutch colonies. I gathered from Stein that this man was an
  unsatisfactory person in more ways than one, all being more or less
  indefinite and offensive. It was solely for his wife's sake that Stein
  had appointed him manager of Stein & Co.'s trading post in Patusan;
  but commercially the arrangement was not a success, at any rate for
  the firm, and now the woman had died, Stein was disposed to try another
  agent there. The Portuguese, whose name was Cornelius, considered
  himself a very deserving but ill-used person, entitled by his abilities
  to a better position. This man Jim would have to relieve. "But I don't
  think he will go away from the place," remarked Stein. "That has nothing
  to do with me. It was only for the sake of the woman that I . . . But as
  I think there is a daughter left, I shall let him, if he likes to stay,
  keep the old house."
  
  'Patusan is a remote district of a native-ruled state, and the chief
  settlement bears the same name. At a point on the river about forty
  miles from the sea, where the first houses come into view, there can
  be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep
  hills very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep
  fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the
  valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the appearance from the
  settlement is of one irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the
  two halves leaning slightly apart. On the third day after the full, the
  moon, as seen from the open space in front of Jim's house (he had a very
  fine house in the native style when I visited him), rose exactly behind
  these hills, its diffused light at first throwing the two masses into
  intensely black relief, and then the nearly perfect disc, glowing
  ruddily, appeared, gliding upwards between the sides of the chasm, till
  it floated away above the summits, as if escaping from a yawning grave
  in gentle triumph. "Wonderful effect," said Jim by my side. "Worth
  seeing. Is it not?"
  
  'And this question was put with a note of personal pride that made me
  smile, as though he had had a hand in regulating that unique spectacle.
  He had regulated so many things in Patusan--things that would have
  appeared as much beyond his control as the motions of the moon and the
  stars.
  
  'It was inconceivable. That was the distinctive quality of the part into
  which Stein and I had tumbled him unwittingly, with no other notion than
  to get him out of the way; out of his own way, be it understood. That
  was our main purpose, though, I own, I might have had another motive
  which had influenced me a little. I was about to go home for a time;
  and it may be I desired, more than I was aware of myself, to dispose of
  him--to dispose of him, you understand--before I left. I was going home,
  and he had come to me from there, with his miserable trouble and his
  shadowy claim, like a man panting under a burden in a mist. I cannot
  say I had ever seen him distinctly--not even to this day, after I had
  my last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood
  the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the
  inseparable part of our knowledge. I did not know so much more about
  myself. And then, I repeat, I was going home--to that home distant
  enough for all its hearthstones to be like one hearthstone, by which the
  humblest of us has the right to sit. We wander in our thousands over the
  face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the
  seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me
  that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
  We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--those whom we
  obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most
  free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,--even those for whom
  home holds no dear face, no familiar voice,--even they have to meet the
  spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its
  valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees--a
  mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy,
  to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear
  conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed
  very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under
  the surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love, the men
  we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the
  pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with
  clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. I
  think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call
  their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to
  meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit--it is those who
  understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular
  right to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes! few of us understand, but
  we all feel it though, and I say _all_ without exception, because those
  who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth
  whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land
  from which he draws his faith together with his life. I don't know
  how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but
  powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion--I don't
  care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference
  means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered.
  He would never go home now. Not he. Never. Had he been capable of
  picturesque manifestations he would have shuddered at the thought
  and made you shudder too. But he was not of that sort, though he was
  expressive enough in his way. Before the idea of going home he would
  grow desperately stiff and immovable, with lowered chin and pouted lips,
  and with those candid blue eyes of his glowering darkly under a frown,
  as if before something unbearable, as if before something revolting.
  There was imagination in that hard skull of his, over which the thick
  clustering hair fitted like a cap. As to me, I have no imagination (I
  would be more certain about him today, if I had), and I do not mean to
  imply that I figured to myself the spirit of the land uprising above the
  white cliffs of Dover, to ask me what I--returning with no bones broken,
  so to speak--had done with my very young brother. I could not make
  such a mistake. I knew very well he was of those about whom there is
  no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly,
  without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. The spirit of
  the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of
  innumerable lives. Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we
  hang together. He had straggled in a way; he had not hung on; but he was
  aware of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a man's
  more intense life makes his death more touching than the death of a
  tree. I happened to be handy, and I happened to be touched. That's all
  there is to it. I was concerned as to the way he would go out. It would
  have hurt me if, for instance, he had taken to drink. The earth is so
  small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-eyed,
  swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his canvas shoes,
  and with a flutter of rags about the elbows, who, on the strength of old
  acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars. You know the awful
  jaunty bearing of these scarecrows coming to you from a decent past,
  the rasping careless voice, the half-averted impudent glances--those
  meetings more trying to a man who believes in the solidarity of our
  lives than the sight of an impenitent death-bed to a priest. That, to
  tell you the truth, was the only danger I could see for him and for
  me; but I also mistrusted my want of imagination. It might even come
  to something worse, in some way it was beyond my powers of fancy to
  foresee. He wouldn't let me forget how imaginative he was, and your
  imaginative people swing farther in any direction, as if given a longer
  scope of cable in the uneasy anchorage of life. They do. They take to
  drink too. It may be I was belittling him by such a fear. How could I
  tell? Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic. I only
  knew he was one of us. And what business had he to be romantic? I
  am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused
  reflections because there remains so little to be told of him. He
  existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for
  you. I've led him out by the hand; I have paraded him before you. Were
  my commonplace fears unjust? I won't say--not even now. You may be able
  to tell better, since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of
  the game. At any rate, they were superfluous. He did not go out, not at
  all; on the contrary, he came on wonderfully, came on straight as a die
  and in excellent form, which showed that he could stay as well as spurt.
  I ought to be delighted, for it is a victory in which I had taken my
  part; but I am not so pleased as I would have expected to be. I ask
  myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in
  which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines--a
  straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And
  besides, the last word is not said,--probably shall never be said. Are
  not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our
  stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given
  up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be
  pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to
  say our last word--the last word of our love, of our desire, faith,
  remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be
  shaken, I suppose--at least, not by us who know so many truths about
  either. My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved
  greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in
  the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds.
  I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your
  imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is
  respectable to have no illusions--and safe--and profitable--and dull.
  Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that
  light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow
  of sparks struck from a cold stone--and as short-lived, alas!'
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 21
target: Marlow starts the second part of Jim's story with a description of Patusan, an extremely isolated island in Malaya that is controlled by warring forces. Patusan has a trading post owned by Stein and presently managed by Cornelius, a cunning, dishonest, and wretched man. Stein wants to send Jim to Patusan to replace Cornelius. When Marlow tells Jim the plan, he does not express his feelings, but it is quite clear that he likes the idea. Marlow then flashes forward two years. He goes to visit Jim in Patusan and is delighted to see how well his friend is doing as the resident manager of the outpost. It is obvious that Jim feels successful; he has mastered his self-defeating romanticism.
feat_summary_analysis: Notes The choice of Patusan as Jim's place of rehabilitation is significant. It is an island so remote that most merchants do not even know about it. It offers the perfect setting for Jim to be able to live without fear of discovery; here there will be no mention of the Patna. The description of Patusan is beautiful. It is a small island divided by a valley separating two hills facing each other. The fissure between the hills symbolizes the split in Jim's being, his romantic side vs. his real side. The setting of the Patusan isle also has a symbolic meaning. The fissured hill with the moon floating out of the chasm is the symbol of Jim's fate; he is to be lonely and separated not only from his own kind but also from his own self. But he will leave his earthly failings behind and start afresh in this unearthly place.