Tea at Trianon: Millennials and the Nameless Enemy

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, June 19, 2016

Millennials and the Nameless Enemy

From Regina:

In the view of so many ‘accomplished’ American students, the two-thousand-year old Catholic Church is little more than a comforting fable perpetuated by such intellectually compromised men as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and Cardinal John Henry Newman. (If only someone had told the early martyrs. They might have avoided being shredded by Roman lions by choosing another fairy tale in which to seek solace from worldly woes.)

If these had just been acquaintances, their condescension likely would have infuriated me. But they were my friends; I knew them too well to feel anything besides heartbreak.

One was the same girl who would get blackout drunk every weekend, dissolving into tears as she stumbled back from whatever party I had been summoned to collect her from. And the guy? Shortly after this conversation, he withdrew from school for an eighteen-month leave of absence to treat his ongoing battle with depression. (Read more.)