Alas, I'm afraid I may have misled you, Susanne! What I think is so well done is not Conrad's description of the half-chronometer as such, but rather the way Conrad tells us so much about Captain Mitchell's character by highlighting how much this (admittedly quite valuable) pocketwatch means to the old sailor — and then, of course, implicitly contrasting what matters intensely to Captain Mitchell (a watch) with what matters to Nostromo (his reputation), to Decoud (Antonia), to Georgio Viola (his concept of national liberty), to Charles Gould (um... possibly a matter of conjecture) and so on. In some ways the novel strikes me as being like a large a large classical painting that contains studies of many interesting-looking individuals gathered in one place (Sulaco), each of whose 'essence' Conrad has been at pains to capture meaningfully and strikingly and who appear have been included in the composition precisely because they do represent a wide range of possible human types, each one contrasting with another. Some effect like this is present in many novels that have a large cast of characters, but for some reason i think it's particularly strong here.Sunrise2020 wrote: ↑June 28th, 2021, 8:55 am Wonderful! Now I’ve two sections for tomorrow’s walk and I’ll listen carefully to the description of Captain Mitchell’s half-chronometer. I must admit the dictionary definition hasn’t helped much
Anyway, enough of my ramblings! I have uploaded section 25: https://librivox.org/uploads/craigdav1/nostromo_25_conrad_128kb.mp3 (38:52)