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| Shipwrecked bow of RMS TITANIC. - Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia. |
You are in close to pitch darkness, excepting the glitter of stars overhead. The ghostly dark shapes of people sit near to you, close enough to reach out and touch. The air is unforgivingly cold, penetrating even the warm clothes you wear and causing your teeth to chatter. The people sitting near you are weeping and shivering, and far away from you, over the sound of lapping water floats the eerie noise of anguished screams and cries for help.
It is 2:25 A.M. You are sitting in a longboat in the middle of a becalmed sea, alive by virtue of only two facts: you are a woman, and you are a woman of means. Only ten minutes previously, the stern of a massive ship had thrust hundreds of feet into the air only a couple hundred yards from where you now sit, clung to by countless passengers unwilling to surrender their lives to the freezing ocean just yet. The ship is gone now, and those countless people now float in glacially cold water slowly but surely freezing to death.
Forget about a certain cheesy shipboard romance between an upper-class girl and a dirt-poor boy with tousled hair. This is the year 1912, and Celine Dion has not been invented yet. There have been no World Wars, science still reigns supreme as a kind of god, and the memory of the late Queen Victoria of England still lives fresh in the memories of British subjects. What we are imagining here is an event that really happened to a diverse group of over 2,200 people, less than a third of whom lived to tell the tale of how the greatest ocean liner ever built sank on her first outing in open water. This event, this most famous of all shipwrecks, has both captured and haunted human imaginations for decades, nay, all the way to the present day, with its self-contained mythological power.
And yet, what is it that still makes the sinking of the Titanic one of the most compelling of all disaster stories from history? It is a fascinating and complex question to ask on the day that the Titanic wreck turns one hundred years old.
As Titanic is a true story of a true ship, the first piece to our puzzle lies in the historical peculiarity of the doomed White Star liner. She was built at the innocent and naive beginning of what would become the world's most violent century, encapsulating in her steel plates and wooden decks a weird optimism of the kind that believes that, quite literally, anything is possible. The Victorian era had just ended, as I said, but no new era had really begun. Europe and England looked out into a future ripe with possibility, adventure, and money to be made. Of course, a bare two years after the sinking of the great ship, the world would plunge headlong into the hell of a worldwide war with no clearly defined aim, purpose, or honor, thus shattering the myth of Europe and England's greatness as the light-bearers of civilization. Titanic was the unexpected last gasp of a civilization on the verge of evaporating.
The plot of Titanic's story also contains everything a great Greek tragedy should have: spectacle, drama, romance, despair, death. I say "Greek tragedy" specifically because of the Greek obsession with the inevitability of Fate. It is a recurring theme of such tragedies that has great pertinence to Titanic. Every little detail of Titanic's story moves the doomed ship one step closer to her watery grave, in a relentless crescendo of bad decisions and natural coincidences resulting in her catastrophic crash and loss.
However, these items present an at-best incomplete explanation of why this particular ship has endeared itself to so many for so long. The real reasons I think are far more fundamental, and ironically enough, completely the opposite of the ship builders' intentions. The Titanic was built to make headlines, in cold hard references to her enormous size, high cruising speed, massive horsepower, and unparalleled grace and luxury. She was the pinnacle of high technology of the time, a monument to the might of the Industrial Age. These were all very impressive numbers, to be sure. And yet the newspapers did not wind up reporting on these technical factoids in the end, because Titanic never reached New York. They reported on one of the greatest peacetime human tragedies to occur at sea.
The key to Titanic's enduring appeal is that it is a human story.
In effect, the scene becomes a microcosm for the end times. The ship is going to sink, without question. And some of the people on board know it. But others remain stubbornly entrenched in denial, refusing to leave the comfort and apparent security of the ship's interior. Still others are trapped below decks, locked in by stewards who desire to prevent a panic and end up creating one instead.
There are glimpses of heroism and cowardice, of powerful love and bitter despair. The ship's architect, Thomas Andrews, is regarded as a hero by all who see him because of his assistance. That assistance costs him his life in the end. The ship's owner, J. Bruce Ismay, is labeled a coward for climbing into a lifeboat when there were still other women and children that could have taken the seat. There is growing heartbreak across all decks, as families realize that the separation they are undergoing is permanent.
There are other ships nearby that fail to respond because of human error. Titanic's very design is flawed because of human error. There are not enough lifeboats because of human arrogance and disregard, and the boats leave half-full because of human inexperience. The fingerprints of man lie heavily on every aspect of the disaster, from its beginning to its end. It is a human disaster, caused and exacerbated by humans as well as endured and remembered by humans. And overall, hanging in the air above the whole catastrophe is the shock of realization, that man's intellect, will, and ingenuity do not actually guarantee anything in the end, that technology has been toppled from its seemingly immovable throne and science lies gasping for breath nearby.
It is a testament to this human quality of the disaster that we have such a complete record of the sinking, including the exact timing of the whole affair. Every survivor of the wreck carried with them a unique account of that terrifying night in the North Atlantic, and we know just about everything important that happened in stunning detail. It makes one laugh and cry to peruse these accounts, ranging in content from the officers' crisp measuring of vital stats of the ship, to the lowly housewife who happened to remember seeing a glimpse of John Jacob Astor and his young wife parting at the lifeboats. Titanic becomes a heartrending aggregate of human vignettes, overshadowed the whole time by the inexorable tilting of her deck as one compartment after another floods with water. It is an intrinsically romantic, horrifyingly tragic story.
It is intriguing that the one hundred year anniversary of the sinking coincides with what the Catholic Church dubs "Divine Mercy Sunday." It is a Sunday to recall the vast depth of God's mercy to His children, an emphasis of His overpowering love that compelled Him to die on a cross for us. We would do well to remember the over fifteen hundred souls of those who perished on April 15, 1912, for God only knows what mercy they required. Titanic's last tribute to the humanity of its creators is embodied in its final plunge to the seafloor: the end of humanity is death and death knows no classes or boundaries. Freezing water kills millionaires and peasants alike.
On this, the weekend of the hundredth anniversary of my most favorite of all shipwrecks, may the souls of all those who lost their lives that bitter April night through the mercy of almighty God Rest in Peace.
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