Shut Up and Sit Down

The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912. Nine days later, Thomas Hardy composed a poem about the disaster called “The Convergence of the Twain.” Many poets were mourning the dead; Hardy took a different approach. He asked readers to contemplate the accident’s prehistory: to imagine how, even as the great ship was being built, the iceberg—its “sinister mate”—had also been growing. “No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history,” Hardy wrote. But, even so, “They were bent / By paths coincident / On being anon twin halves of one august event.”

The poem’s theory of history—as something that unfolds through fated convergences—is also a theory of leadership. For leadership to exist, a leader must cross paths with a crisis; an exemplary person must meet her “sinister mate.” Without an answering crisis, a would-be leader remains just a promising custodian of potential. 

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