The Ship of Fools
I once had the rare fortune to be invited to give a talk at a conference that was held on a boat sailing out of Scandinavia and into international waters.
It was carnage.
The meeting was ironically badged as a symposium; ironically because nearly everyone on board was drunk almost all of the time. Fortunately my talk was on the first afternoon, but even by then people had to continually wake the chair to tell him talks were finished. Hammered pensioners would regularly stumble into the auditorium, stagger round looking confused, and stagger out again; and pretty much everyone who was actually meant to be in the session was already struggling with the kinds of hangovers that cause your brow to wrinkle up in an attempt to drive your brain deeper into the insulation between your eyes and your pain receptors. There was little to do but join in, so I spent most of the following evenings blind drunk.
Each night, my drinking companion was a nihilistic philosophy professor from Finland who only dressed in black. Each evening we would get heartily bladdered, talk increasingly erratic philosophy, but leave enough ill-judged cognitive ability to agree to meet in the sauna at 6am the next day. Every morning, ensickened by the knowledge the other would be waiting, we crawled out of bed at half five and sweated our hangovers out before breakfast and another round of talks, each secretly wishing we could just crawl into bed and die, and ruing the drunken bravado of the night before. We'd then start again, having, by lunchtime, forgotten every argument we'd already explored. In one of the few regrets of my academic career, I had already blurred out my fine companion's name by the time I was nursing the mother of all headaches on the plane, and I never saw them again.
I'd say it was a luck alone that prevented anyone being lost overboard, but no one of any nominal responsibility was sufficiently capable of doing any kind of head-count at any point. For all I know, what limited success I had in my subsequent academic career was entirely predicated on losses to the community resulting from this one utterly hellbound meeting.
3 Nov 1999