Toronto, May 4, 2025
Failure
It’s easy to cope with success, and boring to watch someone do it. Failure is more interesting. It’s hard to fail, but how someone handles it tells you a lot about them. For the observer, failure and success evoke different emotions. Failure may evoke sympathy and sadness—or schadenfreude. Success may stimulate satisfaction and pleasure—or envy. The history of Antarctic exploration illustrates some of these points.
“I am just going outside and may be some time.” So said Titus Oates on March 17, 1912, his 32nd birthday, as he left the tent of the Terra Nova Antarctic Expedition led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott and walked to certain death in a raging blizzard. Oates, Scott and two other members of the Expedition, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers, were making a desperate attempt to return to the Terra Nova Expedition’s base in McMurdo Sound after reaching the South Pole. Oates knew that his poor physical condition—he was suffering from gangrene and frostbite—was a hindrance to the progress of his three companions. For their sake, he left the tent and went off to die. Scott wrote in his diary: “We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.”
The sacrifice of Oates was to no avail. His companions perished a few days later. Scott's last diary entry was made on March 29, 1912: “I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake look after our people.”
The tent containing the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers was found on November 12, 1912. The man who discovered the bodies, Norwegian explorer Tryggve Gran, wrote in his own diary: ““When I saw those three poor souls… I envied them. They died having done something great. How hard must not death be having done nothing.”
Scott and his expedition passionately wanted to be the first men to reach the South Pole. They failed. Yes, they did reach the Pole, on January 17, 1912, but Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, got there five weeks before them, on December 14, 1911.
The story of Scott’s failed expedition is exciting and stirring. He is revered for his bravery and sacrifice. The story of the successful Amundsen expedition is dull by comparison. Scott's journals and letters were emotional and introspective. Amundsen wrote in a factual and methodical style which made him appear distant and pragmatic. Despite their failure, Scott and Oates became the stuff of legend (although some historians have described Scott as a “heroic bungler.”) But we barely remember the name of Amundsen. He is recalled, if at all, as a meticulous professional. Adventure, he wrote, “is just bad planning.”
Out of curiosity, I asked Chat GPT, who knows and understands everything, what it thought about Captain Scott. It commented that Scott “died with the deliberate pathos of someone who understood that death could be a kind of argument. In the aftermath, the British Empire—already fraying—embraced Scott as a metaphor. He was gallant. Tragic. Noble. He exemplified all the illusions that made empires tick: that courage matters more than competence, that character defeats nature, that failure is a kind of success if it's eloquent enough.” I found these comments, wherever Chap GPT scraped them up, to be remarkable. “Courage matters more than competence...” (So much for Amundsen.)
“Failure is a kind of success if it’s eloquent enough.” These are words that may console the defeated. But eloquence in failure is hard to achieve. The defeated are more likely to have their tail between their legs.
Reader comments on Endgame #103 (“Hinge generation”)
From a dear Nova Scotia friend of many years: “I, like many others, have a love hate relationship with today's phone. It's so useful, but I HATE it when it substitutes for conversation, or for simply feeling, seeing and hearing the delights around us on this fabulous planet. When we moved to Liverpool in 1973, to reach Port Mouton, or Port Medway, you had the pleasure of a conversation with Elsie, or Muriel, the switchboard operator. She would be up on the news because she had the option of listening in. She also had status, even when she eventually ended up in a nursing home. Everyone knew her. When I was a university student, Dad would not allow any of us to answer the phone if it rang during meal times. And I don't remember the three of us kids minding all that much... As Canadians we always felt our phones were superior to those in the UK. I remember my mother in tears trying to use a phone in one of those red booths in the shadow of the Bodleian. But, at my aunt's, the bookie was simply a dial away. One asked to lay a fiver on the Derby which we were watching on the telly.”
And an anecdote of my own: In the early 1980s I was having dinner one night with a friend and his family when my host’s phone rang in another room. His wife went to answer it, came back and said, “Darling, it’s for you.” Her husband said, with irritation, “I never take calls during dinner, you know that.” She said, “You should take this one.” He replied, “No, tell them to call some other time.” She said, “Darling, it’s the King of Spain.” (And it was. He was calling my host to thank him for hospitality he had shown to his son, Prince Felipe, then a student in Canada, now King of Spain himself.)
“Failure is a kind of success if it is eloquent enough “There’s the rub I had many professional failures without eloquence.
I accept them with a sort of philosophical shrug.You can’t practice law without mistakes..And if you have a lot of cases mistakes happen.
I’m a week late but what the heck. I love talking on the phone and am sad that it’s going the way of the dodo bird. If I could figure out how to add a photo I would include one of my rotary dial wall phone with the super long cord in our kitchen( good for cooking and talking). We had a lot of fun with the phone when our daughter was young and her friends would ask to us the phone ….we always directed them to the rotary phone and silently giggled as they tried to figure out how it worked. “But it doesn’t have buttons” was the most common remark. Even this tidbit is dated. I’ll have to find a nine year old to try it.