Colin Jack

“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

“…I’ll say: Hey, jerk, see that guy sleeping in a cardboard box at the foot of your building? He’s rowing across the tarmac, he’s sinking too. But he’s not dozens of kilometres out at sea, at dead of night, he is quite easy to geolocate, he’s just in front of your feet. So are you going to send him help or is that my job again?”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat

“Perhaps they are coming not to demand justice (what justice, I repeated) but rather to administer justice, do justice, or even to take the law into their own hands, as the saying goes, which is the precise opposite of justice, but anyway, and given the circumstances, shouldn’t I just throw myself into the sea and drown? The B movie aspect to this hypothesis, feasible though it seemed, made me smile.”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat

“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