It must not be supposed that, in setting forth¹ the memories of this half-hour between the moment my uncle left my room till we met again at dinner, I am losing sight of “Almayer’s Folly².” Having confessed that my first novel was begun in idleness — a holiday task — I think I have also given the impression that it was a much-delayed book. It was never dismissed from my mind, even when the hope of ever finishing it was very faint. Many things came in its way: daily duties, new impressions, old memories. It was not the outcome of a need — the famous need of self-expression which artists find in their search for motives³. The necessity which impelled⁴ me was a hidden, obscure necessity, a completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon. Or perhaps some idle and frivolous⁵ magician (there must be magicians in London) had cast a spell over me through his parlour window as I explored the maze⁶ of streets east and west in solitary⁷ leisurely⁸ walks without chart and compass. Till I began to write that novel I had written nothing but letters, and not very many of these. I never made a note of a fact, of an impression, or of an anecdote⁹ in my life. The conception of a planned book was entirely¹⁰ outside my mental range when I sat down to write; the ambition of being an author had never turned up among those gracious imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in the stillness and immobility of a day-dream: yet it stands clear as the sun at noonday that from the moment I had done blackening over the first manuscript page of “Almayer’s Folly” (it contained about two hundred words and this proportion of words to a page has remained with me through the fifteen years of my writing life), from the moment I had, in the

分享到：