Joseph Conrad

The Inn of the Two Witches (Annotated) Joseph Conrad

This tale, episode, experience-call it how you will-was related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad age-unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but-so to speak-naked, stripped for a run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing, under the gathering shadows.