Heart of Darkness 16.

1.) “…like a sluggish beetle… made you feel very small, very lost and yet it was not altogether depressing…”

When a beetle crawls across the ground, it seems as though it is moving incredibly slow, a beetle is tiny in the whole scheme of things, however so are we. When the ship is being compared to a beetle Cpnrad is merely stating that they are crawling along, at a very slow pace.However though a beetle may be small compared to us, and we may be small compared to earth itself that does not mean that it is depressing in anyway; to be smaller than something in size does not make you smaller in happiness or wisdom.