Great writers show, don’t tell, and Conrad is one of the great writers. Take just the Author’s Note that prefaces The Rescue, in which he recounts coming back to finish the book after a 20 year pause:
‘The years passed and the pages grew in number, and the long reveries of which they were the outcome stretched wide between me and the deserted Rescue like the smooth hazy spaces of a dreamy sea. Yet I never actually lost sight of that dark speck in the misty distance. It had grown very small but it asserted itself with the appeal of old associations…
‘…As I moved slowly towards the abandoned body of the tale it loomed up big amongst the glittering shallows of the coast, lonely but not forbidding. There was nothing about it of a grim derelict. It had an air of expectant life. One after another I made out the familiar faces watching my approach with faint smiles of amused recognition…’
A poorer writer might have simply said ‘I finally finished this book after 20 years, and I am grateful to say it wasn’t such a slog as I thought it might have been.’ And we would yawn, and close the book. Conrad, despite English being his third language, is a true master of it.
Ben David Trigg 
Wonderful ♥️