A symbolic response: seeking the shadow to see, seeking to return to the sustaining dream-ideal.

Giorgio's position here, confronting too many details to take in all at once, is exactly the position of the first-time reader in Part One, and Giorgio's symbolic response is a key to Conrad's stylistic purpose: the reader is meant to impose their own order on the tumult by invoking a "shade" (a dream-ideal) of their own by which to interpret it.