Tea at Trianon: Discipline Your Imagination

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, February 21, 2016

Discipline Your Imagination

From Catholic Exchange:

Among your faculties there is one that, unless it is disciplined and kept in control, is apt to do more to make a fool of you and lead you wrong than any other. It was Nicolas Malebranche, the French thinker, who coined the phrase “the fool of the house” to describe the imagination.

During all your waking hours, pictures are forming themselves in your imagination, whether you are conscious of them or not. Your memory recalls past scenes as they were. But the imagination comes into play and changes those former scenes and experiences into new shapes. When you daydream, for example, you see yourself in new surroundings, you are the hero of remarkable adventures and achievements that never were or will be, and you pass through admiring throngs and are hailed as heroes are hailed. Things that never happened and never will happen may thus become more real to you than reality itself, so that you may fall into such a deep reverie as not to notice what goes on around you. (Read more.)