Hell is other people taking selfies on the seabed
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Version 0 of 1. Do you have £86,000? Great, give it to me, I’ll round up eight more hedge funders, flood my garden shed and play the music from The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. If we coincide it with an important ceremony we may even get Prince William on board. What? You wanted to go to Newfoundland and see the real Titanic? Oh, I’m sorry, some oligarchs got there before you. Tell you what, I’ll do it for sixty grand, but it’ll be lumpfish instead of caviar and I want no more whining. Is the world now filled with people muttering some version of “next year, Rodney, we’ll be millionaires”? You’d be forgiven for thinking so from recent headlines, most notably bringing us news of the compact submersible that takes you down to the floor of the Atlantic to inspect the world’s most famous shipwreck, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, apparently preparing to fly private passengers around the Moon. Imagine trying to commune with the great unknown and some buffoonish Croesus inveigling you into conversation Few would deny that snooping around the Titanic or circling the lunar surface would be an unimaginably thrilling experience; if money were no object and fears of the unknown set aside, who would not want to sign up for such an expedition? But therein lies the issue: one suspects that the size of the party is an integral component of the attraction. Nine people can fit into Blue Marble Private’s seagoing capsule, with the firm making much of the distinguished company they’ll be joining; more people, they point out, have been to the top of Everest than have been to the Titanic (yeah, mainstream mountaineering wimps). Similarly, Musk proposes to take two paying guests on his space flights. It’s an extreme version of Sartre’s No Exit, the play in which three strangers wait in a mysterious room for they know not what, and the source of the much-quoted line “hell is other people.” Imagine trying to commune with the great unknown and some buffoonish Croesus inveigling you into conversation or, worse still, a joint selfie. Reports of the Titanic shenanigans suggest a couple of days spent learning about the ship itself and general orientation; to me, this just sounds like the moment you’re corralled into welcome drinks by the jolly-cum-melancholy holiday rep when actually all you want him or her to say is: “Pool. Bar. Go.” It puts me in mind of a new pizza restaurant that has opened near me in north London. It is only the second branch of an ancient and revered Neapolitan restaurant that was made even more famous by appearing in Eat Pray Love. You must queue; there is a tiny menu. If you can’t imagine the rest, let me underline: it is in north London. The Moon is not a margherita, but our obsession with exclusivity will surely be our undoing. It being daffodil season, call to mind Wordsworth’s lines, on seeing Tintern Abbey and being struck by “a sense sublime/Of something more deeply interfused”. Wordsworth would surely have applauded the Maori community that last week secured the Whanganui river’s legal rights to be treated as a human being after a fight of 140 years. Those who live by the river see it as their ancestor and, they say, always have. They are right. It is not about dominion, nor the solely human experience, but continuity and connection. Though I hesitate to send a load of wealthy thrillseekers there, in search of an epiphany that they may be too pumped up to recognise. |