(Summary: A century to the day after her loss, RMS Titanic has become a Rorschach test onto which we project our own views and expectations. When all has been said and done, however, perhaps the simplest lesson we can draw from Titanic is the hardest one of all for a technologically advanced race to accept: we don't own this joint after all.)
By: Paul S. Marchand
Titanic.
Titanic.
A hundred years after her loss on a cold, moonless, windless night in April, 1912, the great White Star liner still exerts a seductive pull on the human mind.
My first encounter with Titanic came in the late 1960s, when as a young boy I helped (or perhaps hindered) my father put together a jigsaw puzzle reproducing the front page of the New York Times from the day after Titanic had gone down following her collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 41°43' N 49°56" W.
Years later, I began to build, and still have not completed, a model in 1/350 scale of the lost liner (other life issues, like education and career getting in the way). At the same time, I read, and re-read A Night to Remember, Walter Lord’s account of the sinking.
Not long before she died, my grandmother, born in Ireland in 1910, told me that she had heard as a child how her family had originally planned to travel from Ireland to the United States aboard Titanic, but a change in plans delayed their voyage from 1912 to 1913, when they made the crossing aboard a different White Star liner.
Like many Americans, I remain fascinated in an almost ghoulish way by the story of the great and ill-fated ship. My personal library contains a number of monographs on Titanic, as well as on her sister ships, Olympic and Britannic, and my DVDs include both the movie version of A Night to Remember and James Cameron’s epic Titanic, on which a number of acquaintances worked as either cast or crew.
Neither Sophocles or Shakespeare could have written so compelling a tragedy as that which occurred on that cold night of April 14-15, 1912, when the largest moving object ever built by human beings till that time sank on her maiden voyage.
The story of Titanic has become a well-nigh universal Rorschach test for our world and our time; her loss has been interpreted in just about every conceivable way imaginable. To some, it represents nothing less than God’s punishment upon human pride. To others, Titanic’s loss represents an omen of the coming Great War, when all the dispensations of an old world came crashing down. To still others, Titanic’s loss stands as a warning against excessive faith in technology.
We do not engage in such a frenzy of interpretation with any of the other great and terrible shipwrecks of our time. Whether it be the Lusitania, sunk by a German U-boat in May, 1915 with the loss of almost 1200 souls, the Andrea Doria, the Filipino ferryboat Doña Paz (4,375 dead), or the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff, torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the closing days of World War II, taking with her nearly 10,000 people, no shipwreck has ever commanded more popular fascination and attention than that of Titanic.
Rorschachlike, we project onto the tragic events of the sinking of RMS Titanic all of our own fears, insecurities, and political/religious agenda. The loss of Titanic is, in perhaps the most literal sense imaginable, all things to all people. Even after a century, we still project on the Titanic our pet theories and conclusions. All of us have our own personal Titanics.
The story of Titanic’s sinking, in short, has become a morality play from which, for the last century, generations of human beings the world over have drawn a whole variety of lessons, whether well- or ill-taken. What has made the Titanic narrative so universal is that we have a relatively agreed-upon set of facts surrounding her loss; moreover, the Titanic’s loss occurred in the context of an industrialized time in which faith in the ability of humankind to dominate the uncertainties of nature was perhaps at its apogee.
Of course, some of the lessons drawn from Titanic’s loss have been useful ones, particularly with respect to the technical issues of lifeboats, communications, and iceberg avoidance. But perhaps the greatest, and most difficult, of all the lessons we have taken from Titanic is the simplest and oldest one of all, expressed in the old English proverb “Man proposes; God disposes.” Put another, perhaps more secular way, we may not own this joint after all.
A hundred years after that Night to Remember, we still do well to remember that we venture upon the sea at the sea’s own sufferance; we are but guests upon the bosom of the deep, whether we go down to the sea in ships, whether we walk upon the waters on surfboards, or seek to match our swimming prowess against the power of the waves.
The sea, from which our most distant ancestors emerged, still calls us; it still tempts us, and it still reminds us when we venture upon it that in fact we don’t own this joint; the ocean can still kick our ass.
Yet, as much as the ocean can be a stern taskmaster, it also can call forth the noblest impulses of human nature -the capacity for vicarious self-sacrifice, the capacity for compassion, and the capacity to learn from disaster. After any tragedy, we pick up, we carry on, and we pray for those whom we have loved, whether as family or simply because they were our fellow human beings, but whom see no more.
So, for those who never completed their voyage aboard RMS Titanic a century ago, Requiem æternam dona eii, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eii. Requiescant in pace. Amen. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine on them, and may they rest in peace. Amen.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. He is grateful that his grandmother’s family missed their date with destiny aboard Titanic, and made the crossing on another, less famous White Star vessel. The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended, and should not be construed, as legal advice, though one should always steer clear of icebergs.
