There remain few expressions better able to capture the futility of a task than one which
compares our efforts to ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.’ The hull has
been breached, the ship is sinking; to concern ourselves, at such a moment, with the position
of the loungers would be the ultimate folly, the deepest possible failure to recognise
the true hopelessness of the situation. The point sems grimly apt because we are, many
of us, a little like the passengers on a stricken liner. Our larger hopes in life have been
fatally holed: we see now that our career won’t ever particularly flourish; our relationships
will always be compromised; we’ve passed our peak in terms of looks; our bodies are
going to fall prey to ever more humiliating illnesses; society isn’t going to cure itself;
significant political progress looks deeply improbable. Our ship is going down. It can
feel as if trying to improve our condition, let alone find pleasure and distraction would
be an insult to the facts. Our instinct is to be as funereal and gloomy as our ultimate
end. But there’s one crucial element that differentiates
our predicament from that of the passengers who lost their lives on the RMS Titanic in
the early hours of the 15th of April 1912: time. They had little more than two hours
between the moment when they felt the ominous shudder of the impact and the moment when
the once-majestic vessel broke apart and sank into the north Atlantic. We’re going down
too, but far, far more slowly. It’s as if the captain had let it be known that the hull
had been breached, that there were no lifeboats and that there was zero chance of ever reaching
port but had added that it would, for that matter, probably be many decades before we
would actually slip beneath the waves. So though we can’t be saved, though the
end will be grim, we still have options as to how to use our remaining time. We are involved
in a catastrophe, but there are better and worse ways of filling the days. In the circumstances,
expending thought and effort on ‘rearranging the deckchairs’ is no longer ridiculous
at all, it’s an eminently logical step; there could be no higher calling.
When our large hopes for ourselves become impossible, we have to grow inventive around
lesser, but still real, options for the time that remains. Keeping cheerful and engaged,
in spite of everything, becomes a major task. If we were on a very gradually sinking luxury
liner in the early 20th century, we might every evening strive to put on a dinner jacket
and go and dance the Foxtrot to the music of the string quintet, sing a cheerful song
or settle into the Second-class Library on C-Deck - as, all the while, bits of seaweed
and debris lapped at our ankles. Or we might look out for the best spot for our collapsible
recliner so that we could watch the sea-birds wheeling in the sky or gain some privacy for
a long, soul-exploring conversation with a new friend - to the sound of crockery smashing
somewhere in a galley down below. We might try our first game of quoits on the slightly
tilting deck or drop in - contrary to our habits up to this time - on a wild party in
Steerage. Of course our lives would - from a larger perspective - remain a thorough disaster
but we might find we were starting to enjoy ourselves.
Such inventiveness is precisely what we need to learn to develop to cope with our state.
How can we invest the coming period with meaning even though everything is, overall, entirely
dark? It’s a question our culture hasn’t prepared us for. We’ve been taught to focus
on our big hopes, on how we can aim for everything going right. We crave a loving marriage, deeply
satisfying and richly rewarding work, a stellar reputation, an ideally fit body and positive
social change. We’ve not been prepared - as yet - to ask ourselves, what remains when
many of these are no longer available, when love will always be tricky, politics compromised
or the crowd hostile. What are our viable versions of seeking the best spot for a deckchair
on a listing liner? If marriage is far less blissful than we’d
imagined, perhaps we can turn to friendship; if society won’t accord us the dignity we
deserve, perhaps we can find a group of fellow outcasts; if our careers have irretrievably
faltered, perhaps we can turn to new interests; if political progress turns out to be perennially
blocked and the news is always sour, we might absorb ourselves in nature or history.
We are turning to what our society might dismiss as Plan-Bs; what you do when you can’t do
the things you really want to do. But there’s a surprising catch - or, really, the opposite
of a catch. It may turn out that the secondary, lesser, lighter, reasons for living are, in
fact, more substantial than we’d imagined. And once we get to know them, we might come
to think that they are what we should have been focused on all along - only it has taken
a seeming disaster to get us to realise how central they should always
have been.