"the great romantics are often failed classicists"

— p. 208 Boy Parts, Eliza Clark

and

“You see, then, how quick it was. And it is impossible to slow down this film, to examine individual frames…A barrage of frightened crows explodes from the underbrush…Cut to Henry, stepping back from the edge. Then the film flaps up in the projector and the screen goes black. Consummatum est.”

The Titanic is humorously/not so humorously referred to twice in Book 1 of TSH, both times to do with death and fate:

First by Camilla in Francis’ house, joking that a relative of his went down with the Titanic.

A second time on p. 297 by Richard, talking about a switchboard monitor in Hampden ignoring incoming calls (as he is trying to make some to warn Henry that Bunny isn’t coming to the ravine) saying the monitor is “as oblivious as that ill-omened wireless operator on the Californian the night the Titanic went down.”

The references could be:

To evoke a tragedy of human hubris. At the time of its sinking and since, the Titanic has been talked of like a real-life Greek tragedy, where a fatal flaw in the people who made it led to great carnage.

To evoke images of wealth, especially in Francis’ house: the relative that went down was probably quite rich, as his family is rich, and its the kind of wealth Richard romanticises.

Quote on Book 2

TSH & Illusions/Appearances: recurring theme. All of the characters are, to greater or lesser extent, obsessed with appearances and being something they are not.

Who is the true master of illusion? Richard? Henry? Camilla? Julian?

versus

"Do you know," he said, "What Julian says about the Divine Comedy?" "No, Henry, I don't." "That it's incomprehensible to someone who isn't a Christian. That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours?"

-- TSH, p. 184

Believing the hype, entering the fantasy, letting yourself be swept away by delusion are big themes in TSH, and big themes in readers who read TSH.

TSH is both about exploring the power of aesthetic and undermining it. Hampden is at once heaven and hell. The gang are at once admirable and pitiable, ethereal and silly, intelligent and idiotic.

Richard doesn't only think that beauty is terror, he finds terror beautiful. This view of his is reflected and echoed by Henry.

"Morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable" – Henry, p.91 "Reality was transforming itself around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion" – Henry, p.185 "I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrain" – Henry, p.233

Henry finds beauty in the terrible, scary experience of the bacchanal; he arguably finds it so beautiful because it was so frightening. If we remember that this is Richard recalling what Henry has said to him, we can argue that Richard too agrees with this view.

(After all, Richard has no problem being hypocritical and self-obfuscating, so if something is presented in a certain light in the text, its because Rich has decided to do so) (will talk more on that)

TSH, page 260

TSH has these passages which are both funny and kind of worrying.

Bunny had a deprived childhood. We learn, mostly from Henry, that Bunny's parents are penniless but appearance-driven, and that they have instilled this same attitude into Bunny.

Beyond not giving him money and attention and care, there are also subtle hints that they didn't give him food:

Fate and destiny are themes in TSH that are linked to the Greek origin (with Fate being a bigass player in Greek myth and drama) and, to some extent, Gothic. It also plays into Richard's unreliable narration. Let me elaborate:

Richard ends up at Hampden through a series of, essentially, coincidences:

In Cali, he takes Greek "so I could sleep late on Mondays. I was an entirely random decision which, as you will see, turned out to be quite fateful" (emph. mine).

He finds the Hampden pamphlet because he shakes a random coat in his closet and it falls out of the pocket. He doesn't know why its in his closet, "I suppose I'd saved it because it was so pretty". His morbid longing pops up.

He says, "Even today I do not fully understand the chain of events that brought me to Hampden", like it was destiny or fate and not really his own doing.

In his very first meeting with Julian, they talk about fate and pre-destiny: "Psychology is only another word for what the ancients called 'fate'".

Julian remarks: "The country people who live around me are fascinating because their lives are so closely bound to fate that they really are predestined". Julian is a classist. Richard, who is poor and not of the same class as the rest of the Classics gang, would be 'country people' in this case, arguably, especially if we remember that the Classics gang "yearns for England" and city/country, gentry/peasant is classic English classism.

This brings into question: Richard believes his admittance to Hampden was fate, who whose fate? He lies about his class and wealth, he pretends to be someone he is not... Does he take over someone else's fate? And if he believes what happened was fate, but so much of his own free will guided it...

The idea of nature and inevitability comes up a bunch--"I am a Californian by birth and also...by nature". He cannot help who he is and what he does, despite trying. Theme of free will, or of accountability? Again, with the above--if it's all fate, but he is lying about who he is, he is pursuing not his "predestined" country people existence but that of the Classics' gang, exercising his free will in the process...

Henry Winter is such an interesting character, because Richard presents him as this suave, detached, cold, in-control figure, and Richard really idolises him. He's very impressed by Henry, he sees Henry as everything he wants to be and to have (and as a result, so do many readers)

but as soon as we step away from Richard's romanticised view, we can pick up hints that Henry is just a kid who's really desperate for an adults approval--Julian's. We can see this from the start:

Henry buys the same pens that Julian has (and Julian was with him when he bought it, thankyouverymuch), he talks like Julian, he dresses like Julian, he's constantly meeting with and talking with Julian. He's inviting Julian for dinners at the house even though Julian rejects him 60% of the time...

Later, he's desperate to make sure Julian doesn't find out what they did, and when he does and abandons them, Henry is lost and heartbroken. You can read his defeat at the end almost like a result of Julian's abandonment of them.

Julian is pretentious and he does use cult-like tactics (isolating them from the rest of the college, basically telling them to only listen to him (the "better know one work well than many lightly" quote comes from him!! its also bad literary advice lmao)) and Henry falls hardest for them. You can sense he is someone who didn't have adult support, or much social support entirely, growing up, and he's latched onto Julian and the Classics as a replacement family.