current makes travel upriver slow and difficult, but the flow of water makes travel downriver, back toward civilization, rapid and seemingly inevitable. Its harder to travel back in time, when the present is constantly pushing man forward. No man is secluded from the hands of the omnipotent being, which controls yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Every empire has its rise and fall according to the predestined laws of time. Civilization is superficial. The level of civilization is directly related to the physical and moral environment a community is presently in. It is a much less stable or permanent state than society may think. Ordinary people who live with the nave presumption of their resting grounds are now intruders whose knowledge of life was to [Marlow] an irritating pretense, because [he] felt so sure they could not possibly know the things [he] knew ( pg. 149) after returning from the heart of darkness. These people want to look like they live a good life, even though evil pervades every aspect of their being, regardless of the color of skin, for they are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead mens bones, and of all uncleanness (Matthew 23:27). Like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marlow feels a Buddhist influence from the past, telling him that he must share his elevated wisdom with those, who have been sleep walking through their day to day existence, whose lives have not allowed them the opportunity to travel to such remote corners of the mind. ...
