(Some of our readers loved The Teeth of Time, so we've decided the re-publish a small - and slightly edited - portion of it, as a very modest little hommage to the legend of our time, the R.M.S. Titanic: a fitting metaphor for the 20th century - the stuff that our yearnings, and our failures, are made of.
Furthermore, this little post has been timed to appear at exactly 23:40 - or 02:40 UTC - when the ship hit that infamous iceberg and started its voyage into the land of legend.)
On this day in 1912 the Titanic sank.
After having been rediscovered on September 1st, 1985, by Robert Ballard and his team, even its skeletal remains are becoming sparse. Apparently a "gigantic organism" - with "social intelligence", no less - is devouring it.
But you can still hear the Titanic's wail.
Time has a hard time silencing wails.
If you wish to honour the ship and its many dead - as well as its many survivors, for they, too, deserve to be remembered - do yourself a favour and skip Cameron's technically uber-perfect disaster, that posthumous slap in the faces of the real passengers and their loved ones (did you know there were nine newly wed couples aboard, only four or five of which survived together?), and read Walter Lord's A Night to Remember (1953) instead. It is still, to this day, the best and most reliable book on the Titanic.
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