Stalker (1979 film) of the "Time Out Film Guide" has compared "Stalker" to Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", also released in 1979, and argued that "as a journey to the heart of darkness" "Stalker" looks "a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's." As well, "Slant Magazine" reviewer Nick Schager has praised the film as an "endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness". In Schager's view "Stalker" shows "something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that's simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one
Joseph Conrad on the Congo River, an episode that would inspire his novella, "Heart of Darkness". During this period, in 1890 in the Congo, Conrad encountered and befriended the Irish Republican and advocate for human rights, Sir Roger Casement. When Conrad left London on 25 October 1892 aboard the clipper ship "Torrens", one of the passengers was William Henry Jacques, a consumptive Cambridge graduate who died less than a year later (19 September 1893) and was, according to Conrad's "A Personal Record", the first reader of the still-unfinished manuscript of his "Almayer's Folly". Jacques encouraged Conrad to continue writing the novel. Conrad