Dreams are madness ...

Upon examination I find that the three volumes of Joseph Conrad's Collected Works were bought from Books Buy & Sell (what kind of a name is that?) at 711 George Street, Sydney. Almayer's Folly and Victory cost $4.90 each but The Mirror of the Sea together with A Personal Record, a slimmer volume, I got for just $4.80. I think perhaps my friend gave my $15.00 and I felt obliged to spend it all in the one shop on something that I would remember buying. I don't know why I chose those two works of fiction but do recall that I wanted the autobiographical pieces for a particular reason. Years before, in some library, I had photocopied from some book or other a part of a reminiscence in which Conrad described himself, as a young man, standing watch on the deck of his ship moored at Circular Quay, passing the time in conversation with a fellow down on the dock who was, I feel almost sure, waiting there with a piano that was either to be taken away to a house or theatre somewhere in Sydney, or else loaded onto a ship. I remember the exclamation with which Conrad ends the story: His name was Senior! I wanted to have the book from which the anecdote came and suspected - or knew? - that it was in one of these two autobiographical pieces. Well, now I can't remember if the story is told in The Mirror of the Sea or A Personal Record, nor quite why I was so keen to track it down - unless it was because in those days I wanted to make any connections I could between the larger, especially literary world, and my adopted home. It was as if those bona fide literary connections gave some meaning, potential or actual, to my own presence here. Now, this minute, I have taken the book down from the shelf and, without much trouble, found the passage, which I might as well repeat here: On one occasion I had an hour or so of a most intellectual conversation with a person I could not see distinctly, a gentleman from England, he said, with a cultivated voice, I on deck and he on the quay sitting on the case of a piano (landed out of our hold that very afternoon), and smoking a cigar which smelt very good. We touched, in our discourse, upon science, politics, natural history and operatic singers. Then, after remarking abruptly, "You seem to be rather intelligent, my man," he informed me pointedly that his name was Mr. Senior, and walked off - to his hotel I suppose. Shadows! Shadows! I think I saw a white whisker as he turned under the lamp-post. It is a shock to think that in the natural course of nature he must be dead by now. There was nothing to object to in his intelligence but a little dogmatism maybe. And his name was Senior! Mr. Senior! I also note that, by the bye, the remark of Conrad's that is memorialised on a plaque at Circular Quay comes from earlier in the same section (XXXIV) of The Mirror of the Sea. He is speaking of the harbour: ... one of the finest, most beautiful, vast and safe bays the sun ever shone upon. Conrad is a very quotable author and it seems somehow disappointing that something so bland should have been chosen from the riches available. On the other hand Sydney, like my younger self, has anxieties about belonging (I don't say that I have lost mine) to the larger world, so perhaps in this desire to amount to something is the reason for the choice of that particular quote. And anyway it is difficult to imagine any municipal authority, anywhere in the world, putting on a plaque something like this (from Victory): Dreams are madness, my dear. It’s things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.