Tea at Trianon: The Years of the Locust

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

Sunday, April 15, 2012

The Years of the Locust

A testimony to God's mercy.

In all of my years in New York City -- years of bad mistakes, of humiliation, of foolhardiness -- I harbored the secret fantasy of moving somewhere far away where nobody knew me, a place where my life would be a blank slate and I could start over. I had all kinds of career plans in this fantasy, most of which involved buying a dilapidated old warehouse in a decrepit town like the one where I now live and turning it into a thriving arts center. To actually move away from the city, though -- and probably to actually move anywhere -- you need a good reason, and to turn old warehouses into arts centers you need a lot of cash, so my fantasy stayed a fantasy.

And then it happened -- part of it, at least. We moved far away to a place where I knew no one and no one knew me. And so here we are.

Every day my life here becomes different in ways both big and small. The big ways include things like adding another child to my family through adoption. The small things include learning to accept that "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil," that, in other words, all is not as I longed for it to be since before I can remember -- that is, a life lived through, by, and for aesthetic values, dominated by beauty, and redolent with the variegated shades of meaning not stated outright, but only hinted at in the music that, over long years of study, became part of me. (Read entire post.)