JS: In a way you are asking the wrong person, because I have spent so much time in the presence of absolute obsessives: there are people out there who are keeping the flame alive. Though actually for a long while, he really was forgotten. I grew up with the story of Scott, and Shackleton was seen as a bit of a failure: he did not quite make it, did he? As historians, it is interesting for you to discover how every generation rewrites what has gone before. I think that this story is now in the public consciousness in a way it has never been, but which is probably just about right. Certainly, from an institutional point of view, peo- ple can reach capacity. I think my next term’s journey is actually to be subliminally continuing to tell the message without too much overlaying of ‘Shackleton this’ and ‘Shackleton that’. I think that, if anything, it is beautifully positioned now. It deserved that moment, its centennial moment, but now let’s prove that we live it, rather than overdoing it. ◎
bad decisions. What do we do once we have made a bad decision, to make a better one? The earning of loyalty and the building of loyalty are, I think, important to leadership and important for how we run our lives. For you students, in your form, in that society or club, in the group of writers that you are with, the mutual respect, the giving of time, the listening, the encouragement, the setting of goals: these are all the things that I think he lived, but with all his flaws too. There was a once very popular, and now hardly read, American Irish writer called JP Donleavy who wrote a beautiful novel called the Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. Balthazar B has a friend called Beefy who is a beatific sinner and to me, Shackleton is a beatific sinner. He has got many, many faults and yet through that shines just that sense of how to cope, how to do it, and that is a life worth living. FM: How can we stop these historical stories like that of Shackleton from falling away and being lost to history?
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THE ALLEYNIAN 711
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
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