Gracefully, finally, without farewells
You may have heard this new item already.
A century ago this spring, as the Titanic entered its death throes and all its lifeboats had been launched, Capt. Edward Smith told his crew: “Men, you have done your full duty. You can do no more. Now it’s every man for himself.” One witness recalled seeing him, probably washed overboard, clutching a child in the water as the Titanic disappeared. A member of the crew always believed it was Captain Smith’s voice he heard from the water after the Titanic was gone, urging him and others on: “Good boys! Good lads!”
“Every man for himself” is a phrase associated with the deadly Costa Concordia disaster, but not as a last-minute expedient. It appears to have been the natural order of things. In the words of one newspaper account, “An Australian mother and her young daughter have described being pushed aside by hysterical men as they tried to board lifeboats.” If the men of the Titanic had lived to read such a thing, they would have recoiled in shame. The Titanic’s crew surely would have thought the hysterics deserved to be shot on sight — and would have volunteered to perform the service.
Women and children were given priority in theory, but not necessarily in practice. The Australian mother said of the scene, “We just couldn’t believe it — especially the men, they were worse than the women.” Another woman passenger agreed, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats.” Yet another, a grandmother, complained, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”
Guys aboard the Costa Concordia apparently made sure the age of chivalry was good and dead by pushing it over and trampling on it in their heedless rush for the exits. The grounded cruise ship has its heroes, of course, just as the Titanic had its cowards. But the discipline of the Titanic’s crew and the self-enforced chivalric ethic that prevailed among its men largely trumped the natural urge toward panicked self-preservation.
Women and children went first, and once the urgency of the situation became clear, breaches weren’t tolerated. The crew fired warning shots to keep men from rushing the lifeboats. In an instance Daniel Allen Butler recounts in his book, “Unsinkable,” a male passenger trying to make it on one lifeboat was rebuffed and then beaten for his offense.
The survivor statistics tell the tale. More women from third class — deep in the bowels of the ship, where it was hard to escape and instructions were vague or nonexistent — survived than men from first class. Almost all of the women from first class (97 percent) and second class (84 percent) made it. As Butler notes, the men from first class who were lost stayed behind voluntarily, true to their Edwardian ideals.
They can look faintly ridiculous from our vantage point. Benjamin Guggenheim changed into his evening clothes that night: “We’ve dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” Whom would you rather have around your wife or daughter, though, when there is only one slot left on the lifeboat?
My comment: A while back I wrote a short article on the appeal of High Fantasy versus Sword and Sorcery, where I opined that no one has a real taste for High Fantasy who does not think the modern age has lost something precious.
This obvious (bordering on tautological) observation generated an amount of irritation, even wrath, in certain persons I respect, but, alas, to this hour my bewildered wit cannot deduce the source of the outrage.
Perhaps I was seen as unpatriotic to the New Millennium. But it is a false and shallow patriotism which holds an American cannot say “no one has a real taste for the beauty of the kimono who has no love for Japan” America may be the most splendid nation on Earth, but we did not invent the kimono. There is no perfection short of Heaven, and no matter what the virtues of the modern age, we have our vices. Some mankind has always had, some are peculiar, or peculiarly visible, in us.
But I do not see how anyone, any honest soul, can read this account and not feel, if only for a moment, that sense of loss and nostalgia which is the heart of High Fantasy. We have lost our men.
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Apropos of this, allow to quote from CS Lewis:
A Confession, by C. S. Lewis
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;
Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.
Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.
I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things…peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
