Tea at Trianon: When We Lose a Sense of Place

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

Friday, May 21, 2021

When We Lose a Sense of Place

From Lit Hub:

I have written in bars, in parks, in theaters between acts of plays, on night buses and in subway cars, in rooms that have been mine and in the bed where I sleep now, in hotels, in other people’s houses, on planes, in barns, at desks, near cliffs, on the banks of canals. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

A writer can be obsessed by the question of where to write. On the one hand, she needs an intimate understanding of a place in order to make it real on the page. But she also needs to dissociate from her actual surroundings so that a story’s setting can appear in her mind in full detail. Joyce wrote his Dublin in Zurich, Trieste, and Paris. Proust wrote his Paris in Paris, albeit in a cork-lined room. It is often recommended to maintain a boring garden shed, or to put your desk against a wall.

I was born in New York City and moved to London in the fall of 2012. Before long I was convinced that I was home. My phone autocorrected flavor to flavour and organize to organise and center to centre. I had close friends and had seen all of Peep Show. I liked gallows humor and clouds. But I did not like to be teased. I could be awkwardly effusive. I did not pick up on fleeting ironies. On one occasion I brought too many cookies to a friend’s birthday party and the likely cost of the cookies was briefly a subject of lighthearted conversation. I did not understand the nuances of class in Britain. “Neither do we,” a friend said, but he at least knew what to bring to parties. (Read more.)