Tea at Trianon: The Grieving Brain

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, March 12, 2022

The Grieving Brain

From The Next Big Idea Club:

Grief is the wave that knocks you off your feet, like being underwater and spun head-over-heels, with the fear that the moment will never end, and you will not survive. Grieving, on the other hand, is how the feeling of grief changes over time without ever going away.

Grieving means that the hundredth time a particular wave of grief sweeps you off your feet, you may still want to escape, but it will also be familiar. You have probably learned by this point that you will survive the moment—horrible as it is. You may have learned how to comfort yourself and give yourself kindness, and begun to acknowledge that you carry a grief that may unleash itself at any time. That change in grief over time is grieving.

If you expect that grieving means you will no longer feel grief, then you will be disappointed. The wave will crash over you in six months, or six years, or six decades after your loved one died. Grief is the natural response to loss, to the awareness that your loved one no longer walks this earthly plane. Grieving means that you will react to these pangs of grief differently over time. And so, grieving takes a long time.(Read more.)