Tea at Trianon: Visits to Nature

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, July 19, 2021

Visits to Nature

From PsyPost:

Visiting natural settings such as parks, forests, and beaches is associated with improved mental health, according to a large international study. The new findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“We’ve been exploring the relationships between time spent in around water environments (rivers, lakes the sea) and psychological health for over a decade but all of our work was conducted in the United Kingdom so we didn’t know whether these findings generalized across different countries and cultures,” said study author Mathew P. White, a social and environmental psychologist at the University of Exeter Medical School.
“We were lucky enough to get a grant from the European Union to explore these issues and this paper is one output from a large survey conducted across 18 countries to explore these international comparisons. The larger aim was to see whether better urban planning and management could integrate water into cityscapes to benefit mental and physical health while also reducing the risks (flooding, drowning, etc.) but first of all we needed to see what the benefits might be.” (Read more.)