Tea at Trianon: To the Young Who Want to Die

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, July 30, 2022

To the Young Who Want to Die

When a young person wants to die it is the greatest tragedy. From Marginalia:

By the time we can even begin answering for ourselves the question of whether or not is worth living, myriad things have been answered for us by the fundamental forces that have conspired into the confluence of chance that is our self. None of us choose the bodies or brains or neurochemistries we are born with, the time and place we are deposited into, the parents we are raised by, the culture we are cultured in. Any sense of choice we might have is already saturated with these chance inheritances and is therefore, as James Baldwin so astutely observed, part illusion and part vanity.

And yet live we must, with the cards we have been dealt, daily answering Camus’s question with our pre-answered fundaments of chaos and chance.

On those days when we are so life-weary, so defeated by the chance-circumstance of our situation, so tempted to answer in the negative, the smallest gesture of kindness can be nothing less than a lifeline. That is what Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917–December 3, 2000) realized over breakfast at a hotel one day in her late sixties, when the young waiter met her simple bright “Good morning!” with a gasp on the verge of tears: “Oh, thank you, thank you!”

She wondered what he must be living through, if so early in life and so early in the day he was already so heavy with despair, so grateful for the salvation of a simple smile from a stranger. (One such smile had saved Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s life half a century earlier.) (Read more.)