Deep sea diver

For 73 years, RMS Titanic lay like a silt-coated tomb, two miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, where it sank after a violent run-in with an iceberg. In 1985, Bob Ballard, a Naval officer-turned-ocean archaeologist, dragged a deep-sea diver robot over the site and, using powerful sonar and a video feed, found it. It was the first time anyone had viewed the ship since it went down with hundreds of people on board in 1912.

Those grainy first images of the ghost ship ran on repeat across the planet’s TVs. Where were you when you first saw the famous ship reappear? I was holed up in a tiny room in a ground floor tenement in the West Village, cut off from the pleasure of the support that had gotten me there in the first place. I guess that was my idea of being a scholar, though I did turn to soap operas for relief. I bought an electric typewriter, second-hand filing cabinet on Twenty-Third Street, and a door that was placed on top to make a desk, that was my experience of it.