Beyond Cynicism

I was coming to the end of my quota of marking for the day when I found myself watching something on the History Channel. (I regularly interrupt bouts of marking with short breaks to stretch, unwind and get in touch with real life.) The programme was about the history of Antarctica and began with an account of Shackleton's expedition on The Endurance, showing some great period film of the whaling station on South Georgia and of the ship breaking up in the ice.

The story was told in about fifteen minutes, but even that brief version was enough to remind me of how incredible (I use the word carefully) it all was. I suppose it would be fairly easy to comfortably deconstruct the whole thing to render it a metaphor for the failure of Empire or the like. But the difficult truth is that saving those twenty-two men was heroic in the simple sense of the word, and there is such a sense, regardless of how life might like to undercut it.

In fact, it doesn't take much imagination to grasp that, somewhere in this benighted world, there are taking place equally extraordinary tales of survival against the odds on a daily basis, featuring the kinds of people we find it difficult to envisage as heroes. Not so much a cause for celebration as for making you feel a bit small, a bit petty, a bit of a whinger, all told.