Tea at Trianon: Self-Control

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

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Self-Control

And where to get it. To quote:

In our time, unlike any other, technology has made it possible for individuals to survive for quite a while without actually depending on each other -- and it's even possible for families to seem outwardly unified but inwardly all fractured. We've lost the knack for knowing what a family really is.

A lot of folks think a family is a sort of vehicle for mutual entertainment or shallow fulfillment. Ladies get caught up in the cuddly vision of babies, hardly realizing how small this aspect of babies turns out to be, in reality. Men think that video-gaming will continue as before. Having never worked on anything concrete (knitting? gardening? furniture-making? brewing? spackling? car repair?), many latter-day would-be adults think of life as the process of acquiring things.

Immature people, tricked by being detached from the true purpose of marriage, which is building a family, think that children are an interruption of life rather than life itself. The interruption seems intense but limited (I'm reminded of that funny line in Ghost Town when a girl exclaims over a birthing story, "Ten hours is a long time to wait for something!"), and the unsuspecting parents figure that they can endure some painful moments until, they hope soon, they can pass on the irritation of the day-to-day child-related drudgery to others. Increasingly, to the government. (Read entire post.)