You’re an author, not yet aware of your powers. The woman you loved has betrayed you, life for you no longer has meaning, so one day, to forget, you take a trip on the Titanic and are shipwrecked in the South Seas. You are picked up, the sole survivor, by a pirogue full of natives, and spend long years, forgotten by the outside world, on this island inhabited only by Papuans. Girls serenade you with languorous songs, their swaying breasts barely covered by necklaces of pua blossoms. They call you Jim (they call all white men Jim), and one night an amber-skinned girl slips into your hut and says: “I yours, I with you.” How nice, to lie there in the evening on the veranda and look up at the Southern Cross while she fans your brow.
You live by the cycle of dawn and sunset, and know nothing else. One day a motorboat arrives with some Dutchmen aboard, you learn that ten years have passed; you could go away with these Dutchmen, but you refuse. You start a business trading coconuts, you supervise the hemp harvest, the natives work for you, you sail from island to island, and everyone calls you Seven Seas Jim. A Portuguese adventurer ruined by drink comes to work with you and redeems himself. By now you’re the talk of the Sunda, you advise the maharajah of Brunei in his campaign against the Dayaks of the river, you find an old cannon from the days of Tippo Sahib and get it back in working order. You train a squad of devoted Malayans whose teeth are blackened with betel. In a skirmish near the coral reef, old Sampan, his teeth blackened with betel, shields you with his own body; I gladly die for you, Seven Seas Jim. Good old Sampan, farewell, my friend.
Now you’re famous in the whole archipelago, from Sumatra to Port-au-Prince. You trade with the English, too; at the harbor master’s office in Darwin you’re registered as Kurtz, and now you’re Kurtz to everyone—only the natives still call you Seven Seas Jim. One evening, as the girl caresses you on the veranda and the Southern Cross shines brighter than ever overhead—ah! so different from the Great Bear—you realize you want to go back. Just for a little while, to see what, if anything, is left of you there.
You take a boat to Manila, from there a prop plane to Ball, then Samoa, the Admiralty Islands, Singapore, Tenerife, Timbuktu, Aleppo, Samarkand, Basra, Malta, and you’re home.
Eighteen years have passed, life has left its mark on you: your face is tanned by the trade winds, you’re older, perhaps also handsomer. Arriving, you discover that all the bookshops are displaying your books, in new critical editions, and your name has been carved into the pediment of your old school, where you learned to read and write. You are the Great Vanished Poet, the conscience of a generation. Romantic maidens kill themselves at your empty grave.
And then I encounter you, my love, with those wrinkles around your eyes, your face still beautiful though worn by memory and tender remorse. I almost pass you on the sidewalk, I’m only a few feet away, and you look at me as you look at all people, as though seeking another beyond their shadow. I could speak, erase the years. But to what end? Am I not, even now, fulfilled? I am like God, as solitary as He, as vain, and as despairing, unable to be one of my creatures. They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.