Like Carving a Path Through the Congo

There are times when I am given a book to read in class, and by the end of that book I immediately understand why that book is important and why it resonates even until this day. Heart of Darkness was not one of those books.

Heart of Darkness, I will openly admit, seems like the kind of book that was once considered very posh and important because it pretty much says that colonialism is hypocritical and bad, and in our modern time casts a large and not-at-all-ominously named "Company" into a questionable light. It seems as if the only reason why we consider it a classic is because it is old, and it reminds us of the mistakes once made in the past against native peoples.

Heart of Darkness is not well written, in my opinion. For the time, it was probably excellent and exciting and horrifying, but I don't think that this is the case anymore. It makes me think of a phenomenon that I like to refer to as "Nostalgia Goggles." We are found to be wearing Nostalgia Goggles when we think a thing is good and important now, because it was good and important at some previous point in history and for no other reason. We usually see this is mediums such as Film and Video Games. The Maltese Falcon was a good movie for its time, and did a lot of things right. However, if you were to re-release that movie with the exact same dialogue, film quality, camera direction quality, and other aspects of the film, it wouldn't be considered good by the majority of people, unlike when it came out.

From reading the reviews on Goodreads and elsewhere, I feel that Nostalgia Goggles have been keeping Heart of Darkness alive while the general consensus of the book comes out to "meh." It's okay. It might mean a lot to you if you're into it, but a lot of people won't like it at all. Yet, we put so much stock into it that one review puts it like this: " Heart of Darkness is one of those classics that you have to have read if you want to consider yourself a well-educated adult. "
Why?
I could learn most of the important lessons of the book by brushing up on the history of colonialism, and would likely be more educated about world events and important matters than if I read Heart of Darkness. 

This is not to say that all that is old is automatically bad. There are films and media that withstand the test of time. I just don't think that Heart of Darkness is one of them.