Conrad, Shakespeare, and Poetry-Reciting Sex

I finally finished Heart of Darkness today. It was my nemesis in AP English my senior year of high school, and when I read the last word (darkness, of course,) I felt a burning, putrid passion of I-hate-Joseph-Conrad-ism, combined with an overwhelming relief of "Oh thank the LORD I can finally read something else now!" Of course, that "something else" became Jane Austen. And hopefully by now, you know that Jane Austen is my girl crush of the 19th century. Her writing is boring and it is formulaic but it is awesome! I love her characters. I swear Mr. Darcy lives in a tiny little tube thingy of my heart. He does. It's probably why I'm still single.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I'm writing about Heart of Darkness because my literature-loving nerd-self now likes this book. I can't say I love it. But I like it. I respect it. I understand (in a sense,) its essence. Yeah. Anyway.
My favorite part is when Marlowe says,
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies--which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world--what I want to forget."
Ohhh, it is so beautiful! I mean we're taught that lying is bad. It is sin, it is dirty, it is detestable to God. It is natural to we humans because we are dirty and detestable, and let's face it, sinning is what we do best.
But for a human to hate lies. That's pretty awesome. He hates it because it APPALLS him--the TAINT of death, "the flavour of mortality in lies" (that's my favorite part...oh, the language!)
I watched Shakespeare In Love today. I hadn't seen it in forever and I love Gwyneth Paltrow, and I forgot how GOOD Joseph Fiennes was. And his brother Ralph, who I totally have a crush on after The English Patient. But anyway, so the writers of this movie did such a creative job in mirroring the life/written works of Shakespeare to the life of the author and his new lover, Viola.
They meet when she, a total lover of Shakespeare's works, disguises herself as a man to try out for one of his plays. (Men were only allowed to act...no women. Ugh patriarchies.) So she ends up being pretty much the best, so she gets the part of Romeo, then he discovers she's this dreamy beautiful woman, they get hot and steamy while simultaneously reciting the lines from Romeo and Juliet to each other. (It totally beats Nora Roberts' sex scenes. For real.)
Of course, she has to marry this terrible a-hole (Colin Firth...ahhh, love,) and by the end she is discovered as a woman, but Queen Elizabeth totally defends and lies for her, but Viola still has to leave for America with yucky Wessex. However, because of this experience, Shakespeare writes Twelfth Night, one of my favorite comedies.
To make a long story long, the lying passage from Heart of Darkness just reminds me of this love triangle thing from Shakespeare in Love. The love between William and Viola is true, but the pretense is all false... they can't marry, they can't defy the whole social network, lalala. Lies are mortal because they eventually fizzle out, they have an end, they fester until they ooze out, leaving nothing but a scab behind.
But if you've ever read Shakespeare's sonnets (My Mistress' Eyes, for example), the lies of men bring out the truth in other men.
Maybe I'm getting all "love is truth, truth is beauty, beauty is freedom" and whatnot, which totally makes me want to watch Moulin Rouge again, but I guess this is what happens when I read literature and ponder over it for a couple of weeks.

And I'm considering taking a book of Shakespearean comedies with me to Tonga. Hmm...