Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Timothy Spearman writes

[from OLYMPIC SHIP OF FOOLS]

Aboard the doomed passenger ship "Titanic," Mr. and Mrs. Astor get some air and take a stroll on deck.

JOHN ASTOR:
Do you ever feel like your star is in trouble?

MADELEINE ASTOR:
I don’t know what you mean, John.

JOHN ASTOR:
My ancestors studied the stars, Maddy. That’s where my name comes from - "Astor."

MADELEINE ASTOR:
But why do you think your star’s in trouble?

JOHN ASTOR:
There it is there, see, just off the belt of Orion. That’s Sirius the dog star - my star.

MADELEINE ASTOR:
But there are nine of them, aren’t there? Which one’s yours?

JOHN ASTOR:
Very good. You’re a student of astronomy. I knew I married the right girl.

MADELEINE ASTOR:
So which one’s yours?

JOHN ASTOR:
All of them.

MADELEINE ASTOR:
You greedy devil. And why do you think your stars are in trouble?

JOHN ASTOR:
Just something Romeo said.

MADELEINE ASTOR:
And what did Romeo say? Tell me.

JOHN ASTOR:
“I fear, too early: for my mind  misgives. Some consequence yet hanging in the stars shall bitterly begin his fearful date with this night’s revels and expire the term of a despised life closed in my breast by some vile forfeit of untimely death.”

MADELEINE ASTOR:
Why this dark augury of disaster?

John Astor observes a falling star amid the seasonal meteor shower.

JOHN ASTOR:
Did you see that?

MADELEINE ASTOR: Yes I saw it. A falling star. So what? When most people see one they make a wish.

JOHN ASTOR:
You speak as if the opinion of most people held some authority, Maddy. Most people are fools. I fear "disaster" and "catastrophe" contain my name in them for a reason and spell my fate.

MADELEINE ASTOR:
You’d do well to heed Friar Laurence’s warning to Romeo.

JOHN ASTOR:
What warning’s that?

MADELEINE ASTOR:
“Affliction is enamour’d of thy parts, and thou art wedded to calamity.”

JOHN ASTOR:
I am bound to you. I chose you  selfishly in an attempt to forestall the collapse of the heavens. The day I placed that ring on your finger, you restored my star to its rightful position in the sky.

MADELEINE ASTOR:
It is there now, blazing powerfully like a beacon. Armed with wisdom as your sextant it could guide your ship. Instead you direct your spyglass at a falling star and  assume it has some connection with you. Has your star really fallen or have you given it a meaning it doesn’t have? Be careful what you wish for.

JOHN ASTOR:
It is not my wish. Only my concern.

MADELEINE ASTOR:
Think more positively. Why don’t you carve our initials in this post and make permanent what you fear is transitory? For as long as this  ship remains afloat so will our love survive. A ship of such grandeur cannot but endure, as must our love.

1 comment:

  1. John Jacob "Jack" Astor IV was a member of a prominent American family and one of the world's richest people, with a net worth of nearly $87 million at his death ($2.13 billion in 2015 terms). His sister Helen was married to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's half-brother. The author of "A Journey in Other Worlds," a novel about life on Saturn and Jupiter in 2000, he also patented a bicycle brake, a "vibratory disintegrator" used to produce gas from peat moss, and a pneumatic road-improver, and he helped develop a turbine engine. In 1897, he built the Astoria, "the world's most luxurious hotel," next to the Waldorf (owned by Astor's cousin and rival, William Astor); the complex became New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He undertook a scandalous divorce in order to marry 18-year-old socialite Madeleine Talmage Force, 29 years his junior, and the couple took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt to wait for the gossip to calm down. When Madeleine became pregnant, they decided their child should be born in the US and boarded the largest ship afloat at the time, the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage to New York. On 14 April 1912, four days into the crossing and about 375 miles (600 km) south of Newfoundland, she hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ship's time and sank during the early hours of April 15; 1,514 people on board did not survive, making this one of the deadliest commercial peacetime maritime disasters in modern history. Astor helped his wife, her maid, and her nurse into a lifeboat and asked if he might join his wife because she was in "a delicate condition," but the officer in charge of the evacuation told him men were not allowed to board until all the women and children had been loaded. Astor's prominence led to the creation of many unsubstantiated accounts about his actions. One of the survivors claimed that Astor was boarding the lifeboat when he saw two children on deck and stepped aside to give them his place; according to a newspaper report, he ordered a woman and her 17-year-old daughter to take the last two places. He was said to have placed a woman's hat on a boy to make sure he was able to get into a lifeboat, and that he opened the ship's kennel to release the dogs. He supposedly quipped,"I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous." He was last seen on the starboard bridge wing, smoking a cigarette a half hour before the ship sank, although one witness claimed Astor was in the water clinging to a raft but released his hold when his feet became frozen. Coincidentally, the Waldorf-Astoria became the host location for the American inquiries into the ship's sinking. Astor's corpse was among the 333 bodies recovered. Four months later Madeleine Astor gave birth to a son.

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