The Fate of Wet Paper

11 April, 1912

It wouldn't be so terrible if some these fools just perished. How childish yet potent this feeling!

I spent the better part of the day attempting to gather notes for a casual ethnography of the people on board this ship. The “important” ones, of course. I came up to first class upon the invitation of Mr. Hawthorne, a great and curious patron of the arts and sciences, whom I briefly met at Cambridge. Even his humility started to wear off as he stooped down to the common denominator at the dining table, as social customs require him to do. For that, I cannot blame him.

Try as I might to temper my resentment about these curious people, I still find them odious and tedious. Many of them don't appear to be really going anywhere. They're simply present, to boast about it, the maiden voyage! To New York, for more tea and sandwiches and parties! What else might they do, living in near complete idleness as is their fate to fulfil?

They live in perpetual comparison to others. As long as their wealth or prestige falls short of another's, they must not allow themselves to be happy, and they must voice their dissatisfaction interminably. And rather than attempting to prevail over their opponents, they resort to stomping them underfoot instead. They belittle every attempt to live an intrinsically motivating life – without metrics. Metrics are all they have got: the acreage of land, the carats of jewels, the crania of Africans! They expect their children to follow a blueprint designed especially for them, and then wail in despair when the children rebel, which they do with great frequency.

How contemptuously they mock the Chinamen and their opium dens, while they themselves gorge themselves on sweets and cigars and drench their livers in saccharine cocktails. How they wince and moan at the first prickling of pain, and beg for anything to make it stop. Strangely, pain assaults them so often one cannot help but think it is of an imaginary sort. Worse of all, they entertain delusions so powerful and reinforced by all around them that their only function must be presumed to be a mind-numbing effect far more potent and longer lasting than the Chinaman's opium. But that hypocrisy must never be made known.

They will lie and bloat, as long as their lies supersede those of their neighbours. They will incur burdensome debts to keep up appearances. The men repeat empty promises from the pews, not long before they scurry away from their timid madonnas to the whorehouse. Of all the beings in the natural world, these must surely be the most unnatural.

They take me for a caricature of a Bolshevik. One can tell merely by the derogatory tone in which they pronounce “Professor.” I made it clear that I am not involved in politics, for that arena requires an inflexibility of mind and a passion of personality I could never muster. Let them all fight each other. How dreadful to be stuck in the middle of passionate lunatics, merely trying to do one's work.

A brutish old man, a financier whose name now evades me, asked me: “What might that work be, Pro-fe-ssor?”

“I am formulating a theory for the biological basis of morality,” I replied, “and for that purpose, I observe animal behaviour, in the wild, and on board ships such as this.” Some found it humorous, but he did not. As predictable as a drunk at a tavern. So easily vexed, like an automaton. And yet precisely the kind of man who will go on interminably about their free will!

So fragile is their confidence, that if it is minutely challenged, they feel taken to either kill or die to retain their honour. And this was precisely what had crossed his mind. To have a sword fight on board this ship, a spectacle for all to see. But seeing as my comment was a very tangential affront to his personal honour – he is an animal after all – he was able to let it pass, but not without a final growl:

“Do you observe them, Professor, these human animals, or do you hunt them with your envy?”

I laugh a hearty Russian laugh, refusing to be complicit in his offence. I would only be offended if it were true. And how much more he resents me now!

In hindsight, perhaps there is an ounce of truth, and that explains why I'm sitting at such a late hour reliving the scene instead of going to bed. But it isn't envy. I merely resent his idleness and cruelty and hypocrisy, and he may resent my observations in turn. He is enslaved in his traditions, which he must defend. He, in fact, enables the freedom of his servants, because without his patronage, the servile type would crush under the weight of his freedom. We have heard why: “He is too stupid to be independent. They all want freedom now: the peasants, the colliers, the factory workers, the women, the colonies. If only they knew how burdensome freedom is, and how much of this burden we bear for them, the poor souls might be thankful.”

Just as the beast can't avoid his rage, and the peasant can't avoid his toil, so this man, this lowly pathetic man, cannot avoid all of the artifices he employs to maintain his sense of self. And as much as I despise him, I must also forgive him, a virtue he will never thank me for. Without regard for the men who go down in the mines so he can travel on trains, without regard for the peasants who grow his food, or the seamstress who sews his clothes, or even the men of science who designed this miraculous, unsinkable ship which he has boarded merely to prove his worth yet again.

Tomorrow I shall be able to forgive it all.

12 April, 1912

My illness has worsened, and I indulged in too much drink. My anger kept me up later than usual, entrapped in a haze of contempt which finally dissipated. How swiftly one can become overcome by a childish, beastly nature, and to wish others ill. In fact, I have now come to pity the poor little aristocrats above. It isn't envy! It is precisely these unfortunate souls who have the least freedom, for they are always under watchful eyes, judging them day and night. Having been born at the top, they expend none of the energy required for moral and intellectual growth, and for this reason, they end up exactly where they started, having learned nothing at all.

The weight of my lecture and my manuscript have been bearing on me. It occurred to me that it would be somewhat humorous if I were to perish before arrival. I've had an enriching time in England. Perhaps it was foolish of me not to disclose that I was too ill to travel. But to refuse an invitation to America... I simply couldn't.

There are a great deal of young immigrants on this ship. Some are joyful, others brimming with anxiety. Moments ago, I walked past a young woman embracing her ill child, whose hollow cheeks appeared like a portend of the end. How tragic for the end to precede a new beginning. So many of these affable young people want nothing more than a bed, a warm stove, honest work, and food on the table. And with that alone, they seem genuinely contented.

It seems that most are hopelessly idealistic, sailing towards a rainbow by the name of Freedom. How sweet and how toxic this hope! Is it a conception of their own or some abstraction cooked up in a far-away cauldron and shipped to them through letters and newspapers? A word so wide in its multiplicity of meanings, I can't really grasp what is meant by it anymore. By their freedom, do they mean being enslaved to so many pleasurable temptations as to be free from anguish? Freedom from hunger? Freedom from a master that can only be gotten by becoming a master oneself? One can scarcely counter the appeal of America. The land is infinite. Westward, ever westward! Jobs are abundant! The poor Irish are convinced that they'll be treated better than the English treat them. Indeed, I suspect the English shall bicker about the Home Rule for a long time still, and much blood will be spilled before the question is settled. Where in the world might the Irish find a semblance of peace but in America?

They do not know how reluctantly Mother America opens her arms and surrenders to the need for labourers. What was that Mr. Beecher wrote, that immigrants “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power”? Never will those hands become experienced enough! The American man is animated by great rhetorical passion and endowed with an astonishing creativity, and it puts this creativity to turn any slightly despised foe into an emissary of Satan, an evil to be crushed. I can only imagine the rifts as the immigrants become a more robust minority. Unless, of course, by a miraculous alchemy that effaces accents, customs, and versions of deities, they trans-substantiate into “real” Americans after a couple of generations, ready to crush a new enemy.

More than a tour of the sights, I hope my sojourn can yield some kind of elucidation of the meaning of freedom. This beautiful word, a vacuous container in which we may insert any meaning we wish.

13 April, 1912

The more I explore this ship, the more terrified I get. How majestic and yet dangerous this galloping pace of technology. Bigger and bigger ships, bigger cannons, bigger explosives.

This other magnificent invention, the air plane, has now been used by the Italians to drop bombs on Libya. Could we not have foreseen such a development? How much destruction will yet come from this cowardly innovation in the art of war? To strike from above, without having to savour the enemy's dying eyes as you strike him? Is guilt even possible then, or do we rise above our morals as soon as we rise above the clouds, from where the enemy looks like dispensable insects? Can there still be any limits to human cruelty when a human city becomes but an anthill to fumigate?

These young men, with blood in their eyes and mouths and hands, are so desperate for a taste of “meaning” that they cannot find a quicker shortcut than this. They are made to feel so worthless and dishonourable that their only desperate choice is to trade in their lives for a badge of “honour”, another one of these vacuous concepts no one can properly define.

I once met a young soldier who came back from the war with Japan. Though any semblance of joy had elapsed him, rather than despise the horror of war, he craved more of it. “What else is there to do?” he asked. What else! A society that cannot provide a suitable answer to this young man and millions like him cannot hope to avoid the cycles of cataclysmic violence that befall them. Imagine my shame when I stuttered to venture an answer, hardly persuasive, about the power of knowledge, family, beauty, and nature! Some would rush to offer him more religion, but this young man was already profoundly religious, and yet, empty, dissatisfied, and completely alone and adrift.

But what of the young man's honour? Where else to find it, to earn it, to purchase it, this cloak of manhood upon his cold, shivering boyish body. What of his brotherhood? The common man struggles to find any other means to prove his worth, and he is willing to destroy another worth-starved man equally involved in proving his worth. How was he to know whether the lofty ideals of his leaders were truthfully worth fighting for? Or he can join the passionate young anarchists, or the nihilists, or the socialists, or the drunken actors. In any case, he needs a formidable enemy, or else he will fight himself to the death!

That which refuses to die a graceful death, dies a violent death. Doesn't a revolution become the new dogma against which new revolutions will be attempted? Is there ever a final stage, in which everyone is contented at last? I doubt it. After a new Robespierre, a new Napoleon.

Whatever Professor Lenin is up to in Prague may be as dangerous as the power of his intellect, his utopian project sublime but so inflexible one must wonder if it can be achieved without incurring as much violence as it seeks to supplant. How many formidable obstacles lie in his way, but how sweet he fruit he offers to the starved young men in his company. How can I be so uninterested in politics, they ask. I prefer questions to answers. I am endlessly suspicious of any man who has claimed to have answered all of the world's questions, and with the same answer too! A master key. I must refuse it.

I often forget that very few keep their eyes on a microscope or a telescope, but most still keep their eyes intently on a mirage on their own choosing. Perhaps the freedom – there it is again – they crave the most is the freedom from all of these unanswerable, nagging questions. Certainly, it must feel soothing to enjoy the silence of having had answered all questions with the same holy answer. Whether a deity is involved or not seems hardly relevant! This tug-of-war, always to one extreme or the other: either God-given meaning, or no meaning at all. What a pitiful lack of imagination! Professor Kropotkin was right to point out that animals routinely distinguish between good and evil without ever having read the Gospels, or Bentham, or Kant. The ants have morality and meaning! And so does every species above them. It is quite clear that we have evolved morality to co-operate and survive, but man, the most arrogant of creatures, insists upon devising his morality apart from the animal kingdom.

Man is not unlike the Underground Man, terrified of being a piano key, played by forces beyond his control and beyond his understanding. Set in motion by no One, and drifting towards no particular destination (like Mr. Wegener's theory of the continents drifting, alive without sentience, like rafts without a captain or a destination, moving slowly at the speed of mountains.)

Man, having deceived himself as belonging to a grand cosmic play in which he has a vital role, revolts at the very insinuation of his insignificance. Certainly, you may be significant to your motherland, and your family, and your community, but that stage is not grand or timeless, but rather provincial, and pathetic, even. And man will always refuse to be pathetic. When we accept the paucity of fossils, the breadth of the cosmos beyond the reach of our best telescopes, there are yet so many more questions left to attempt to answer, and how much more exciting questions are than answers!

What can possibly come of all this ennui, and malaise, and anger, and grandiosity when it is armed with the most destructive inventions yet concocted? The Habsburgs and the Czar might tear Ukraine and Poland into pieces next. What an old and persistent European pastime, to carve up “lesser” countries like roast beasts at a holiday feast, and then have a drunken brawl over who gets the biggest pieces. And then, of course, to remember and avenge the injustice at the next feast!

My only consolation is that I may not live to see the whole of the world implode into this age of technological war.

14 April, 1912

I am now under constant battering of presages of death. I keep hearing birds, a whole flock of them, but this far from land? Impossible.

Often, my premonitions are but mirages that never come to pass. But this ship, this voyage has made me somewhat superstitious. Halfway through the Atlantic, a deep loneliness has set. How eerily, to feel perfectly divided between the Old and New World, between old tradition and the iconoclasm of the revolutionaries. I suppose even I may tire of questions eventually. In my time of dying, am I not entitled to my consolatory fictions? A supreme Answer to quench my thirst?

Is fear at the core of superstition? I have long told, or perhaps deceived myself that death was not to be feared. But now I do fear it. It is an animal instinct, after all, quite resistant to modification. It is a wild horse, and it's uncertain whether I have the strength to tame it.

I had a nightmare, perhaps a daydream, or both, of sinking into the ocean. Drowning, but slowly, all the way to the bottom, as the light and the music died out. And then suffocating in the dark, swallowing water but never actually losing consciousness. Nothing but an escalating asphyxiation in the cold, dark, silence. Let there be light, indeed. We are, quite literally and metaphorically, terrified of the dark. I wonder what Dr. Freud would think of this. I jest, of course. I can't help but think he's a charlatan, though this is at present a very unpopular opinion.

In the darkness, one finally accepts blindness. But we were blind our entire lives! The blind spots in history are the norm. How little we know of our pasts. History is a collection of tiny spotlights amidst an ocean of darkness, and upon this sliver of light we must depend for our navigation. We must sail forth by whatever dim light might be available, and not despair at the perils lurking in the dark. Whatever we may have neglected. Whatever we may not have anticipated. There is no such thing as a safe journey, is there? Of what use would that be? Aren't obstacles the anvil upon which the hammer of nature shapes the evolution of all beings?

Why do men obsess so much about their legacy? What ought we care about our reputation after we're dead? I cannot claim to have made any world-shattering discoveries, but perhaps my findings can be of use to some greater mind trying to collect the pieces of his puzzle. I should only hope to be able to finish my manuscript when I return to Petersburg. A few months, that is all I ask! But then I laugh, surely! Ask of whom? Of what use is asking, begging, hoping even? Can death be bargained with? Does death come more swiftly when we surrender to it, or does it slow its offensive, because it refuses to strike a man who has dropped his shield?

15 April, 1912

It is past midnight, and I cannot stop laughing. An indestructible ship! What a dream, a human delusion of immortality projected onto a god-like vessel. I must admit, even I fell for it. A mere brush with an iceberg, they say. It was barely perceptible, and yet, and yet!

Mr. Andrews knows precisely that he cannot live with the shame of his deflated arrogance. A beautiful ship he did indeed build. But I have just seen his face, and it communicates rather clearly what I've seen in the mirror the past couple of days, staring back at me: the intimate knowledge of death. We could survive scarcely a half hour in these waters. It is quite eerily evident from the complexion of the officers that any help won't be arriving so promptly. And so it must be, we shall be swallowed by the Atlantic.

The laughter isn't joyful or disrespectful. It is a manifestation of something deeper which I cannot control. So few have properly understood the gravity of the situation. Rather, they're annoyed to be pulled out of bed. What a tragedy for these families and those trapped below. In this atmosphere of despair, miraculously, my pain has completely dissipated. It is a sort of medicinal panic. But I must sit in a corner and write, or else it might become a different kind of panic.

Should I go up to the boats and attempt to elucidate my credentials in order to be granted a chance to survive? To argue that I am an important man? That posterity might benefit immensely from my contributions? How they would laugh! They should, indeed. Chain me to something so I don't give in to the cowardice. “Why?” they will ask. I could explain it to them: we cannot control an animal's instinct for self-preservation! You may wish to drown yourself, but as you start to suffocate, your body will revolt against your brain's rational suicide and will do everything in its power to survive a little longer! If only to attempt to die again at a later time.

The allure of immortality is irresistible. I will not be remembered for any great theory, but I'd like to be remembered in the history books as the one who originated a good enough theory that deserved to be dispelled by a greater mind. But the strength of my intellect isn't sufficient to cause my name to outlive my body. If I perish here, so does any mention of me. Why do I bother, still, to craft each sentence in this private journal as if it were part of a work of art, and as such, meant for others? If I were truly a man of my word, I would willingly throw this journal into the sea with a smile. But I do crave a channel of communication with the future, with you, whoever you may be! The presumptuousness of all of us who crave prestige beyond our deaths.

I've gone to assess the situation. The panic is spreading, and the ship is tilting. It only takes an intuitive mathematician to realize that the lifeboats are insufficient. The officers have no confidence in loading full boats, as they seem to fear the ropes might not bear the weight. It is a patently absurd and homicidal fear! Everyone desires to get on the boats, but not without their loved ones, and thus all seem beautifully torn apart by the impossible choice between peaceful death or life in terrible grief. But time will reward seats to those most capable of making the choice.

One man tells a most beautiful lie, so confident and mesmerizing, to his wife and children, that he will see them soon. Another one of those indeterminate words we love so dearly. Without a tear in his eyes, or a quiver in his voice, as if he truly believed it... that is until he turned his back on them and imagined their grief when they catch up to his lie. A heroic lie, nonetheless.

And yet many women go swiftly, to survive perhaps with a modicum of relief, to be rid of their men at last! They would have never had the courage, or the right, to leave such men. How gracious and cruel that this fateful iceberg has come upon our path.

As the ship leans further into the water, the music is cut with the roars of wood cracking and the humdrum tone of futile prayers. This embrace of death is so dreadfully slow.

Perhaps we have an hour left, and so I find another table in the dining room. The silly old financier interrupts me with a smile. “Pro-fe-ssor! Don't you know what happens to wet paper?”

In this odd moment, he strikes me as rather affable. Is it courage or is it a final acknowledgement that his life is rather vacuous and superficially meaningful anyways? Where might he have found this courage and equanimity? He holds a bottle of scotch, which he appears to be willing to share with me.

“How funny that a few days ago I wished you dead, and you probably wished me dead as well... and here we are. How funny!”

I invite him to sit but politely ignore him as I write a final paragraph. I intend to run and offer the notebook to a young woman on her way to a lifeboat. I will beg her please to find Professor Miller, and tell him to contact Ivan in Petersburg for my manuscript. If it's worth anything, make it known. Otherwise, to the flames! But let not this frigid ocean be the judge.

Then I will return to this table, help him finish the bottle quickly so our senses may be dulled, and ask him: “don't you know we have always been fated to be wet paper?”