Ian Warden: Was the Titanic quest an act of adventure or sheer folly?

- From the seafarers' hymn Eternal Father Strong To Save.

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Always obsessed by the RMS Titanic and made especially mindful of her by last week's ocean tragedy, I find myself thinking of the great vessel's first-class gymnasium as I pedal a stationary bicycle in my classless gym in the cellar of a Canberra shopping centre.

The Titanic gym, too, had exercise bicycles. Cameras ogling the charismatic wreck have testified that some of the bicycles and other exercise contraptions are still there. (Nearby, also in first class, cameras have shown a chandelier, still hanging, swaying with the currents.)

We know from survivors' testimonies that during the Titanic's last terrifying hours some first-class passengers pedalled the gym's bicycles in attempts to keep themselves warm. If that thought didn't haunt and move me as I pedalled in my gym in recent days, I would worry about the unfeelingness of my emotional health.

The special poignancy of the sinking of the Titanic and its continuing (but slowly, slowly decomposing) presence on the ocean floor is, for those of us who can feel that poignancy, one of those phenomena that words can't properly capture.

It has something to do with the might of the tempestuous sea and the vastness of the Deep, and something to do with the mighty loss of life (1500 souls) and with the unforgettable stories of our brothers and sisters, the survivors.

Then there is the shirtfronting moral parable we find in the way the majesty and state-of-the-art engineering excellence of the miraculous "unsinkable" vessel were powerless to save it. Similarly, wealth and rank can never save any of us, even kings and queens, (whether we live our brief lives in life's first class or in its steerage) from eventually going the way of all flesh.

And so to not be able to hear and feel the call of the Titanic is surely to be a brick short of an emotionally-literate load.

READ MORE: IAN WARDEN

One element of the Titanic magic is that she was so very beautiful.

While the modern ocean liner is surely the ugliest man-made thing ever made by man (it doesn't look at all like a ship, its sheep-like live export passengers crammed into looming and heaped Stalinist on-board apartment blocks), the Titanic was shapefully ship-shaped.

Helpful websites juxtapose to-scale images of the Titanic with today's megaliners and as well as being struck by disparities of size (the Titanic is elfin by comparison), one sees how the Titanic by comparison with today's ugly shapeless floating brutalist brutes has a kind of long, slender, streamlined elegance. She is a sculpture, while the modern liner is just a floating heap.

In recent days and as mainstream and social media have clanged and gibbered with unfeeling comments about the filthy-rich five (each reportedly paying $250,000 for the adventure) inside the Titan submersible, I've been wondering whether or not I would take such an adventure.

Dear readers, imagine for the moment that you have money enough and derring-do enough to squeeze into a Titan-like submersible and go to the Titanic. Now, in this imaginary referendum, do you enthuse that YES, the call of the Titanic is irresistible and you must go down to see her? Or do you purse your sensible lips and tsk tsk that, NO, these sorts of underwater jaunts are vaingloriously pointless and an irresponsible waste of money better spent responsibly on deserving things here on land?

I find, rather liking it about myself, that I am an unhesitating YES. My hankering for a pilgrimage to the Titanic was triggered in 1986 by the first photomosaic images of it following its discovery (73 years after its sinking!) in September 1985.

Media churls and trolls are dismissing the Titan passengers as filthy-rich "tourists" who took a vainglorious excursion. But I think of the five (and of James Cameron who has dived to the Titanic 33 times) not as tourists but as passionate explorers and/or adventurers who have been in a position to express their passions for exploration and adventure.

These sorts of passions are a characteristic of our species when it is at its courageous, questing best.

What's more, these explorers who choose the haunting and mystical carcass of Titanic as a focus for these important passions are displaying a degree of poetry in their first-class souls.

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