The horror, the horror. Thank you for that bit of Conrad.
Twenty years later, I just re-read 'Catch22', Joseph Heller. Appropriately, a sense of déjà vu strikes, déjà vu being one of the main themes of the book.
The main character (with really is you, the reader) becomes convinced everybody is out to kill him : the germans, his superiors, his flight crew and the girl friends they go and ficky fick while on permission. And the doctors too.
Rules are mired in catch 22. You have to be mad to fly and be shot at. If you're mad, you should be grounded. But if you tell them you're mad, you must be sane, because you're scared to fly. And if you're scared, you're sane, and you can't be grounded, so you'll have to fly more missions.
The brass are very confident of the importance of their rank, and profoundly insecure about the importance of their rank. Slowly and surely, they grow the number of missions that have to be flown before you can get sent home, you are always 2 or 3 missions short.
And through all these contradictory paradoxes is woven the character of Milo Minderbinder, Mess Officer, who builds a private enterprise emporium (in which everyone has a share) with the available airplanes : figs from the Lebanon, cutlets from Spain, he corners the Egyptian cotton market, buys eggs at 7 cents in Malta , to sell them for 5 cents in the mess, but that's all right, because he first bought them in Sicily at 3 cents, to sell them in Malta for 5 cents, so he's making money all the way, and that's ok, because everyone gets a share. He contracts out to the Germans to bomb and strafe the American base - with American planes, the luftwaffe having been shot out of the sky - but that is perfectly all right, because it brought an enormous profit, and everyone has a share.
Yossarian is stuck in a universe of madmen, crazy people, homicidal maniacs. And genius crooks.
Déjà vu all over again.
Belgium is selling arms to states who promote terrorism. We're getting paid for the arms that kill us.
'Catch 22' was never more up-to-date.
Cheers!