Tea at Trianon: Peter Pan and Lost Memories

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

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Peter Pan and Lost Memories

From The New Yorker:

To lose the ability to fly is to lose the supremacy of the imagination over reality: it’s the demise of enchantment itself. Peter has the keenest imagination of all the Lost Boys. Alone among them, he makes no distinction between a meal of real and imagined foodstuffs; for him, the conceptual and the tangible are interchangeable. He has the most at stake as adulthood beckons, and he’s the most determined to hold on to his boyish fabrications. He will not grow up. This may seem an easy way out of life’s difficulties, but Peter is also singular among the Lost Boys in suffering chronic nightmares, from which Wendy can only half protect him:

For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence. At such times it had been Wendy’s custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him… and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he quite woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she had subjected him.
The riddle of his existence? Barrie, who can take an omniscient viewpoint with the most confident of authors, suddenly pulls back from judgment. It seems that if Peter refuses the burdens of adulthood, his refusal brings burdens of its own. (Read entire article.)