Conrad wrote The Shadow Line in 1915-16 (published in 1917), and dedicated it to his son Borys and his fellows who were off to the front. It is autobiographical, set in 1887, when, at a young age, Conrad was given his first command, a sailing ship out of Bangkok. I’ve spent over forty years teaching college students (mostly of traditional college age), and now my own children and step-children are at that age, and so this short novel gave me a lot to think about. Excuse this post for being a bit of a ramble…
The shadow line is where we could say a youth becomes an adult. There is a lot to unpack there, obviously, but amongst the young people I have known, I can have at least some sense of whether they were still in a state of youth, or had entered that next phase, which entails a new awareness, sometimes but not always disappointing, of how the world works, combined with a realization of their own responsibility for how they make their way in it, of owning up to their choices and consequences.
The plot of the novel is simple: our young, unnamed narrator (let’s call him Joseph) makes an impulsive decision to leave his post on a steamship, and pack in his career, a decision that more experienced hands in the trade find mystifying (though I can say I have observed, and done, such mystifying things myself). By chance there is an opening for someone to take command of a sailing vessel, and in a quick reversal, Joseph, who has been recommended for the post, takes it on. We could call this a move from labor to management, as Fredric Jameson does, but I’m not sure I would, since in the end Joseph puts in an awful lot of hard physical labor. His crew has picked up some malady in Bangkok, and only Joseph and one other hand, Ransome, seem to be immune. Worse, they are stuck in the doldrums in the Gulf of Siam, with no wind for the sails, followed by a dreadful storm on a severely undermanned ship. Worse still, Joseph had assumed there were adequate supplies of quinine on board, only to discover that the previous captain (now dead) had sold the supplies.
Where Joseph crosses the shadow line, if we could pick one moment (and I think often it comes down to that), is where he has to tell his very sick crew the state of things, that there is no medicine:
What could one do? The first thing to do obviously was to tell the men. I did it that very day. I wasn’t going to let the knowledge simply get about. I would face them. They were assembled on the quarter-deck for the purpose. Just before I stepped out to speak to them I discovered that life could hold terrible moments. No confessed criminal had ever been so oppressed by his sense of guilt. This is why, perhaps, my face was set hard and my voice curt and unemotional while I made me declaration that I could do nothing more for the sick, in the way of drugs. As to such care as could be given them they knew they had it.
I would have held them justified in tearing me limb from limb. The silence which followed upon my words was almost harder to hear than the angriest uproar. I was crushed by infinite depths of its reproach. But, as a matter of fact, I was mistaken. In a voice which I had great difficulty in keeping firm, I went on: ‘I suppose, men, you have understood what I have said, and you know what it means?’
A voice or two were heard: ‘Yes, sir … We understand.’
They had kept silent simply because they thought that they were not called upon to say anything; and when I told them that I intended to run into Singapore, and that the best chance for the ship and the men was in the efforts all of us, sick and well, must make to get her along out of this, I received the encouragement of a low, assenting murmur and of a louder voice exclaiming, ‘Surely there is a way out of this blamed hole.’
There is so much here. Joseph feels tremendous guilt over having set sail without adequate medicine. No jury would find him guilty of negligence: the prior captain concealed that he had taken the medicine off the ship, and the port physician was rather slapdash in his inspection of the supplies. Nevertheless, I think we can all understand his emotions about this. But it comes to him that self-flagellation would do nobody any good, and would only serve to place his own feelings and emotions over the welfare of the crew. One of my favorite essays is Elaine Scarry’s “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” which holds that while it is not possible for us to imagine all the emotions and needs of others, save perhaps for a very few, it is in our power to diminish the importance of our own impulses, and that this is the beginning of ethical reasoning.
Joseph realizes the importance of being direct and honest with his crew: no sugar-coating, but neither making the situation more hopeless than it is (and in fact, the ship and crew do come through in the end). And he finds that through this honesty, the crew rallies, at least in spirit if not, for the moment, physically. Joseph cannot, alone, save the ship. But his frankness can reinforce that they are, literally, all in the same boat.
Finally, Joseph is changed. At the beginning of the novel, which takes place only a few weeks before the passage I quote above, Joseph is introduced to us as petty, surly, and self-absorbed. The strength to cross the shadow line was in him, but he had not yet done so. And then there is a moment where he must.
I teach (taught) in an arts administration program, where we receive students who have typically majored in one of the fine arts, and want to give the management side a try. As at I think many universities now, we are encouraged by our administrators and mission statements and such to teach these students “leadership.” But what are we to teach Kyle from Terre Haute, with his BMus in bassoon performance, about leadership? It’s not that he is not capable of leadership, eventually. But how to instruct?
I’m honestly not sure. There are politicians on the right who cling to the unproven belief that professors can change the political preferences of their students, and most academics get a chuckle out of that. But then how do we shape character? By example I suppose: if we ourselves demonstrate honesty and transparency, selflessness, calm under pressure, control over our own emotions (which Adam Smith found to be a foundation of ethical behavior), then maybe we help shape the young people around us. In the novel Captain Giles says to Joseph, after his ordeal is done, “The truth is that one must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad,” and it is well to remind our students of this when we can. This would be at least something of a counterweight to the rise of national figures who are brazen in their dishonesty, their selfishness, their emotional incontinence.
I came across The Shadow Line only recently - it is referred to near the end of Michael Oakeshott’s essay “On Being Conservative,” which I was re-reading. It has the famous passage:
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
Oakeshott thinks the young are less likely to be conservative than the old - the young have less to be conservative about. But youthfulness does not lend itself to the practice of politics. In the final paragraph of the essay, Oakeshott writes:
Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands - unless it be a cricket bat. We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable. We are impatient of restraint; and we readily believe, like Shelley, that to have contracted a habit is to have failed. These, in my opinion, are among our virtues when we are young; but how remote they are from the disposition appropriate for participating in the style of government I have been describing. Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own. Some unfortunate people, like Pitt (laughably called “the Younger”), are born old, and are eligible to engage in politics almost in their cradles; others, perhaps more fortunate, belie the saying that one is young only once, they never grow up. But these are exceptions. For most there is what Conrad called the “shadow line” which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of fact, not poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions. And coming to be at home in this commonplace world qualifies us (as no knowledge of “political science” can ever qualify us), if we are so inclined and have nothing better to think about, to engage in what the man of conservative disposition understands to be political activity.
Are today’s college students slower to cross the shadow line? I don’t think we can say. As Oakeshott says, some cross very early, some never do, there are many contingencies. Conrad thought his son and his friends being thrust up to the line by the outbreak of war would prove to be their shadow line - not ever having been in military conflict I cannot say, I would not pretend to know. Conrad might be right, but only a monster (and Conrad was not a monster) would think that a positive aspect of the horror of war is to turn boys into men (I realize that such monsters do exist).
Can we teach any of this? Oakeshott claims that conservatism is a disposition - it is not an outlook that anyone can be persuaded to take through argument and rhetoric. But maybe we can at least make our students aware of the idea that an understanding of our world, as our world actually is, and our places in it, our own smallness in the grand scheme of things, is in front of them. That in a crisis - hopefully not a sailing ship laced with cholera, unable to move! - they will find something in themselves they didn’t know was there.
Assist in the crossing is the best we can hope for, I think. In my workshops and seminars, we talk about leadership as a practice. Students get the chance to reflect on what matters to them, how that’s changing as their education continues, and how they show up in the world. But I can no more teach them to be leaders than I can teach them to enjoy listening to a specific piece of music: they will (or won’t) come to it in their own time. Good post.