The privileged of presumptuous entitlement who become static in their perceptions and ossify in their ways

 

Those who become static in their perceptions 

and ossify in their ways 

As this excerpt from 'A Night to Remember':

‘There’s Talk of an Iceberg, Ma’am’

 
Almost as if nothing had happened, lookout Fleet resumed his watch, Mrs Astor lay back in her bed, and Lieutenant Steffanson returned to his hot lemonade. At the request of several passengers second-class smoking-room steward James Witter went off to investigate the jar. But two tables of card players hardly looked up. Normally the White Star Line allowed no card playing on Sunday, and tonight the passengers wanted to take full advantage of the chief steward’s unexpected largesse.

 
There was no one in the second-class lounge to send the librarian looking, so he continued sitting at his table, quietly counting the day’s loan slips. Through the long white corridors that led to the staterooms came only the murmurs of people chatting in their cabins ... the distant slam of some deck-pantry door ... occasionally the click of unhurried high heels – all the usual sounds of a liner at night.

 
Everything seemed perfectly normal – yet not quite. In his cabin on B deck, seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer had just called good night to his father and mother, Mr and Mrs John B. Thayer of Philadelphia. The Thayers had connecting staterooms, an arrangement compatible with Mr Thayer’s position as Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Now, as young Jack stood buttoning his pyjama jacket, the steady hum of the breeze through his half-opened porthole suddenly stopped.

 
One deck below, Mr and Mrs Henry B. Harris sat in their cabin playing double canfield. Mr Harris, a Broadway producer, was dog-tired, and Mrs Harris had just broken her arm. There was little conversation as Mrs Harris idly watched her dresses sway on their hangers from the ship’s vibration. Suddenly she noticed they had stopped jiggling.

 
Another deck below, Lawrence Beesley, a young science master at Dulwich College, lay in his second-class bunk reading, pleasantly lulled by the dancing motion of the mattress. Suddenly the mattress was still. The creaking woodwork, the distant rhythm of the engines, the steady rattle of the glass dome over the A deck foyer – all the familiar shipboard sounds vanished as the Titanic glided to a stop. Far more than any jolt, silence stirred the passengers. Steward bells began ringing, but it was hard to learn anything. ‘Why have we stopped?’ Lawrence Beesley asked a passing steward. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ came a typical answer, ‘but I don’t suppose it’s much.’

 
Mrs Arthur Ryerson, of the steel family, had somewhat better results. ‘There’s talk of an iceberg, ma’am,’ exclaimed steward Bishop. ‘And they have stopped, not to run over it.’ While her French maid Victorine hovered in the background, Mrs Ryerson pondered what to do. Mr Ryerson was having his first good sleep since the start of the trip, and she hated to wake him. She walked over to the square, heavy glass window that opened directly on to the sea. Outside, she saw only a calm , beautiful night. She decided to let him sleep. Others refused to let well enough alone. With the restless curiosity that afflicts everyone on board ship, some of the Titanic’s passengers began exploring for an answer.

 
In C-51 Colonel Archibald Gracie, an amateur military historian by way of West Point and an independent income, methodically donned underwear, long stockings, shoes, trousers, a Norfolk jacket, and then puffed up to the boat deck. Jack Thayer simply threw an overcoat over his pyjamas and took off, calling to his parents that he was ‘going out to see the fun’

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How little human nature changes. The wardrobe accoutrements and gadgets camouflage the underlying arrogance and hubris of the materialistic ego over the ages. Whether on the Titanic in 1912 or here in 2021, those who glory and indulge themselves in the trappings of their status see no further than those trappings and their social position. Their myopia of perspective is circumscribed by the smugness of their temporal kinetics and its achievements for them as the horizons of being willing or able to conceive other expectations for their standings.

Like those literal and figurative lost souls on that vessel in April 1912, those of this similar status of privilege take for granted all those paradigms and means that have set them in their present position as immutable. But just over the horizons of their ill-presumed presumptions of existence, that which is more foundational as the underlying medium of their cul-de-sac perspectives either awaits or will have its inevitable engagement in its incidental operation of qualities. Those qualities will overwhelm these 'indifferents' who've avoided or dismissed this phenomena as an isolated anecdotal of others, not their concern or care. Because of that attitude these 'privileged entitled' will find themselves being dragged down and under by the dynamics they thought would never be their concern, let alone their existences call of reckonings.

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