Mystery Fuels Adventure

One of my favorite books is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Within the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s narrating character, Marlow, speaks of the wonder, mystery and adventure hidden within the blank spaces of maps. When the story was told, when the book was written these blank spaces were shrinking. The potential adventures were shrinking with those blank spaces.

"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps . I would look for hours at South America,or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there… True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness."

I remember as a child the unknown provided room for the imagination to stretch. The less you understood of the world the more adventure there was in it. This could be the reason we grow less adventurous as we grow older.

Going back to the mystery of the blank maps, those spaces have been filled and the endless possibilities of adventure lost. So far this adventure has never been completely lost. When the European explorers sailed to the ends of the earth exposing all that was mysterious, human sense of adventure took to the unknown lands. The manifest destiny sent adventurous pilgrims west. Once the seas and lands were fully explored we took to the skies. The adventurers were the Wrights, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart.

The concurring of the skies led to the jet age which opened a whole new mysterious void to renew our adventurous spirit, space. Those of that time quickly grasped the mysteries and explorations of space, and once again imaginations ran free and wild. We have massive amounts of science fiction as artifacts of those times. We also have the products of the good and evils of space age technology. My high school had a bomb shelter under a library that was built during the Cold War.

With the increase in technology and the use of satellites and space probes the once huge and overwhelming mysteries of space are quickly being filled. What will be the mysteries that fuel the adventures of future generations? Where will our imaginations lead us now?