While I didn’t fall for that theory, I took full account of the type of people that did. This partially explains why I don't take to strangers in large groups. Alaine and I were over for the last time before the estate sale. Here is Alaine in the dining room with one of the agents. The grand piano is gone, though I can’t imagine who’d be playing it. At mid-day, I took a rather high-speed sidecar trip to Coral Gables. The idea was a visit and moral support over a difficult stretch. Alaine and I toyed around with her new iPad. I’ve never used one but in the end we got the important features operating. We parked the sidecar down the road and drove to the estate. I liberated two books from the upstairs balcony but most of the encyclopedias and other collects will be lost with the sale. I declined to stay over and blasted back home through two rainstorms.
I can’t get used to the old place not being there. I missed JZ, who has unplugged his phone. The batbike behaved perfectly the entire 66 miles. On the way back, I stopped at the club to pick up those filet steaks I forgot after Karaoke. It was baked ribs with Alaine and a relaxing view of the big saltwater aquarium. My exposure to marine ecosystems is limited to book-learning and one continuing education tour I took in 1990-something. Oops, don’t forget the shark tank on Phuket Island. I was there in 1986 but never learned anything. Hey, I was in Thailand.
The fish tank doesn’t enthrall me, but the operation of same is fun even to watch. Corey added some creatures I did not know existed. Like these vegetarian crabs that kept some kind of growth off the tank. Things along this line surprise me but should not, considering the ocean is a closed system. Every last item is recycled. Is there a perfect balance that can be duplicated in a fish tank? Let’s wait and see.
At first I though it might be a spoof about the uppity attitudes of the undeserved wealthy, but by second chapter, I’m getting more of a general public hatred of the entire class, much more so than you get today. The rich, if you don’t hob-knob with them, exist for most people as newspaper articles, undertaxed citizens near election time, and houses to drive past on Sunday. The rich of today deal with unruly peasants more through legislation than intimidation. As in empower the cops to round them up.
Initially, this story likens the downfall of the upper classes to the industrial revolution and how machines took away the noble part of work. Rowing a boat or furling a sail was good, but stoking a boiler was evil. The same revolution made new groups of millionaires who owed their fortunes to the machines but never the workers to ran them (as if there was a difference). The upper deck included the Englishman with a “sarcastic and superior smile at the corners of his mouth”. Or the champion boxer, who, shunning the gymnasium, practiced with his trainer on the deck so all could admire. The pious preacher who concluded praying was thanking by the rich and asking by the poor.
What is funnily curious is how often the writer predicts the future pathways by which this behavior became absurd. That’s excellent work, considering nobody knew about political correctness till long after the war. I’ve only begun the book, which leads off with a becalmed sailing ship drifting along until the Titanic appears. The rank and file of both ships take little notice, but the upper classes and captains are obsessed with theories why the occupants each boat should feel sorry for the other.
We’ve met the Hungarian painter, who laments he cannot capture the glorious little barque and instead is condemned by fate to painting “archduchesses and banker’s wives”. And the American son of a furniture manufacture who pointedly grumbles that he had to suffer a $500 cabin because all the first-class berths were “already taken”. And we love the droves of tittering wives brimming with not-quite-sarcastic remarks. Jointly and severally, this crowd shares an attitude about the one thing none of them have ever done: work for a living.
Thus, I must read on to find out what this author is getting at by making these points in an era when the Titanic was already a legend. He doesn’t like the myth surrounding famous events and he’s doing great so far peeling it away in thick layers. If this unseasonable rain keeps up, I’ll have lots of time to read. And think. Things are changing rapidly across the board here and I know the reasons.
Later, the book leaves the Titanic mostly alone for the next few chapters. Instead, there are some excellent views on history that I’ve not found even in university texts. How Ziegfeld cleverly rented all the halls that the Astors built in their New York slums to be able to say they were community-minded. His agents negotiated fifty-year leases, then turned the halls into theaters that made Ziegfeld so rich he “adopted Oriental customs in more than one respect”.
[Author’s note: this book is long out of print and not easy to read. There are long chapters of religious discussion I do not find all that fascinating. The preachers and rabbis go on about how the wireless radio was just a device using one of countless invisible waves that modern man had forgotten how to harness. That government now consisted only of vegetarians, fools, and cowards. The builder of the Taj Mahal shot hundreds of youths through the heart with an arrow of gold, never missing. Not a book for everyone.]
