Imagery of fog and mist is pervasive in Conrad's stories and in his thinking about the nature of "art", described in his Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) as "like life itself ... inspiring, difficult-obscured by mists". The Preface contrasts the artist's "truth", his attempt to do justice to the visible universe, with that of the thinker or the scientist. The artist, confronted by the enigmatic spectacle of life, "descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife" finds sensory impressions, aspiring to "the colour of painting" and to the magic suggestiveness of music, seeking to revivify "the commonplace surface of words" in fragments that "shall awaken in the hearts of all beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity: of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world".
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