Tea at Trianon: Building a Habit of Curiosity

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, November 17, 2021

Building a Habit of Curiosity

From LitHub:

A project may be about the future, but it can also help you look back on familiar things from a new perspective. I’ve always been charmed by Walter Benjamin’s essay on book collecting, “Unpacking My Library,” but it didn’t feel personal until recently. I don’t have first-editions or association copies on my shelf, but the constellation of wood dust and paper scraps is the same in my library as in his. Benjamin admits that through his books, the book collector “proves to be speaking only about himself.” Why did these old books speak to me now, in the spring of 2021, when they’ve been accessible to me my whole life? Last year when the world shut down, tangible things seemed to evaporate in a cloud of hand sanitizer. I was separated from my family by an impassable distance. I longed for connection to something real, something that had endured. The wear on these books, their elegant ownership signatures, the scraps of paper stuck between their pages all pulsed with life. I longed to reanimate their history—and my own. The project reveals you to yourself. (Read more.)