In which Matthew remembers the Titanic

A week ago, I was bored, so I texted Brandi six times in a row. Each text contained a different-sized section of the lyrics to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Three of them were cut so as to end with the words "go on," separated by a series of spaces, as if introducing the text that followed. The final one ended with "go on/and on." One message was just the word "near"; one was just "far." The whole performance was very spare and evocative. She was touched. I really do hate her so very much.

And today, I came across Paul Strohm's riff on a similar theme (Theory and the Premodern Text, 2000): "Troilus [and Criseyde, Chaucer's poem about love during the Trojan War] executes writing's most solemn cultural assignment, which is to connect the past with the future. It is always about the burdens of its own prehistory: the abduction of Helen, the narrowed options imposed by the precondition of the Greek siege. And it is no less about its own unhappy future: the end of love, the fall of Troy, Troilus's own death. It is founded in a moment of enlarged temporal vision -- the prophet Calchas's recognition of Troy's inevitable doom -- a recognition it always tries to forget and never succeeds in forgetting.

"One might say, drawing on a more recently popular image: this ship's iceberg was already out there when it set sail; an aspect of destiny rumored, discussed, but never embraced ('taken on board?') as an inevitability. I mention this 'schlock icon' in order to suggest that our culture has its own fascination with the concept of a present held hostage to the past and future. A present that, however banal, gains a certain luminosity from our retrospective knowledge of its ephemerality. Just as I was writing this essay I encountered a story in the New York Times about the very high auction price of a boarding card for the Titanic. The boarding card (framed, auctioned by Sotheby's, reverenced) is the icon, or mark, of a wound in time, a moment when time is fractured or divided within itself, a major part of its meaning reliant upon retrospective illumination."