Titanic Obsessions

Heather Cox Richardson

One hundred years ago, in April 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, taking more than 1,500 people with her.

I’ve never been one of those people obsessed with the sinking of the Titanic. When I was a child, my mother carefully pored over the passenger lists and the investigation report and talked of the steerage passengers who died in families; I carefully avoided what seemed to me deadly dull columns of names and numbers. In 1997, when the world wept over the movie about it; I thought Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were so annoying I cheered on the iceberg.

But for all my refusal to engage with Titanic obsessions, I find the images in this video strangely fascinating: http://www.rmstitanic.net/100th-anniversary.html.

They seem to me part art, part tomb.