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Quote by Joseph Raphael Becker

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Annabelle & Aiden: The Story Of Life

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Joseph Raphael Becker

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“Norris met another survivor on board who told him that he had been bringing home a prized dog on the Titanic and had gone to the kennels and released all the dogs a half hour before the ship went under. Norris described to him how when he was swimming away from the sinking liner he had spied the black face of a French bulldog in the water.”

“A larger share of the answer to the question why the Titanic still arouses so much interest, however, may lie in the position that the Titanic held in the world of 1912. The Titanic was not simply a means of conveying people from a place they wished to leave to a place they wanted to be, as is the case with most modern ships. It was a floating symbol of status, almost a materialized article of social faith. Its owners had succeeded admirably in establishing it as a symbol of safety, luxury, exclusiveness, and social privilege. This world was smashed in an evening, indeed, in a matter of hours. The watertight compartments which the owners had puffed so extensively turned out to be worthless. The pride of twentieth-century technology floundered and plunged like the weakest seventeenth-century pink. Millionaires and immigrants from the third-class shared the common experience of death. Death, it was suddenly recognized, could strike down a Rothschild or a Guggenheim as quickly as it could a stoker. All in all, the sinking of the Titanic was a demonstration of man’s fate in microcosm.”

“The Titanic disaster combined the inevitability of a Greek tragedy with the ominous warning of the medieval morality play. it marked the end of an era, and with the Titanic sank the snugness and smugness of the Edwardian illusion that there were no limits to man’s ingenuity and progress. In place of this hard-lost illusion came the harsh recognition of the onset of the age of insecurity, of which the Titanic offered the first forebodings. The Titanic disaster marks a partition in human history, and for this reason, in addition to its essential drama, it will always arouse interest as a tragedy of historic and epic magnitude.”