Colin Jack

“I know people would have liked me to say: You’re not going to die, I’ll save you. And not because I would have actually saved them, done my job, done the necessary, sent rescue. Not because I’d done what you’re meant to do. They wanted me to have said it, at least to have said it, just to have said the words. That was what the investigator was waiting for anxiously, for everyone to hear, to hear their own voice in mine in these recordings. The voice of each of us saying I will save you. Each one in my place. The voice of the whole of humanity reassured to hear itself saying, uttering the words: I will save you; you will not die – not actually saving, no one cares about that, not acting, not even helping. But at least saying it, because to fail to say those words is to be less than human. In the end, whether they drowned or not didn’t matter; what mattered were my words. What mattered was not that they were saved; it was that I should be saved, and the whole world with me, through these words. Saved by my own words, not condemned by them.”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat

“What she called absentmindedness seemed to me so unremarkable, so common, and so universal – indeed the basis of everyday life – that one could only conclude that all of us are monsters, that is to say, none of us is.”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat

“But it’s enough for one to be lost and there is always one, there has to be one – and it’s as if you had saved no one. So with all this going on, this ongoing shipwreck, why bother? I asked. And why save this person rather than that one, when they are all condemned. And what justice is there? Why save one, ten, twenty; it’s all same, since you can’t save them all. There is always one left.”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat

“...the sea was always with me. There it lay, the entire length of my journey, on my right, poisoned. There were the terns and the gulls, the greyness, the pallid light, the sea with its guts glutted with women and children. Sometimes, despite the fatigue of the night shift, I had to stop on the way, park the car by the roadside and walk to the edge of the cliff to look at it: the progression of cargo ships, their hypnotic slowness, and it, at my feet, in front of me, lifeless, enormous, malign. Universal and monstrous. It’s the one thing that never sleeps.”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat