2023-07-23 18:25:29
Icon of the Seas opinion
The psychological problem of the world’s largest cruise ship
As of: 6:25 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Drive, but where? “Icon of the Seas”
Quelle: © Royal Caribbean International
“Take a look at paradise,” says the advertisement for the “Icon of the Seas”, now the largest cruise ship in the world. A “new era of vacation” is to dawn with the gigantic vehicle. But with the mega dimensions, a psychological problem arises.
It couldn’t be overlooked: what is now the largest cruise ship in the world has test sailed and the media was full of it. Sometimes admiring, sometimes shuddering, sometimes downright disgusted, the superlatives of the “Icon of the Seas” were listed: the 20 sun decks and the free fall slide, the high ropes course and the park with the real natural trees, the ice skating arena and, last but not leastthe floating infinity pool.
Even the garish outdoing prose of the shipping company Royal Caribbean International was quoted, which wants to herald nothing less than a new “era of vacation” with the Megaliner 2024 – an advertising promise that, like the ship itself, follows a motto that the probably most notorious, but definitely the most corrosive and disturbing cruise reportage in literary history formulated right at the beginning: “Penetrance comes before variance.”
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This reportage was written by the then 33-year-old David Foster Wallace, immediately after he had completed a thousand-page novel, which is now regarded as the most caustic and disturbing testimony of the fun society. Its title, “Infinite Jest,” refers to a film whose endless entertainment kills viewers or returns them to the state of a voracious toddler.
“Metaphysical Death Repression”
“Once a certain level of satisfaction is reached,” Wallace writes in Terribly Amusing – But the Future Without Me, his soon-to-be-swollen 180-page report, which he insatiably peppers with footnotes, “the bar is raised a little bit, and the kid won’t rest until that higher level is reached — and promptly turns out to be a terrible disappointment.”
So could it be that the gigantic growth of the “Icon of the Seas” is not just Babylonian hubris, but sheer business necessity? Does every infinity pool have to become even more infinite and, if so and possible, where, if you please, does that end? Infinity – remember – is a dangerous word after all.
“For one like me, who had never been at sea before this cruise,” writes David Foster Wallace, “the ocean has always been synonymous with horror and death.” Soon he imagines himself in an “archaic death machine” that, like every megaliner, is an offshoot of the “Titanic”, and yet he cannot help but admire how skillfully “the dream of victory over this very death” is being worked on here.
Fitness rooms and beauty salons promise “iron exercise”, discos, casinos, stage shows promise “merciless pleasure”, and then there is the “third way of metaphysical death repression”, which leads directly to the nirvana of doing nothing “without exercise and excitement”. “Take a look at paradise”: That’s what it says today on the website of the “Icon of the Seas”, which is already taking bookings. If David Foster Wallace hadn’t taken his own life 15 years ago, this sentence would probably have interested him intensely.
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