Tea at Trianon: The Waste Land

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, September 4, 2022

The Waste Land

From First Things:

But the best place to read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—in order to commemorate its one hundredth anniversary this year—is the airport.

The airport is a sacrament of modernity, an icon of power, control, efficiency, logistics, and smooth banality. It’s the placeless instrument by which millions of people, who don’t know one another, don’t want to know one another, nevertheless profitably use one another for a few hours to further advance their authenticity, somewhere else. At the same time, more than any other place in the world, our ordinary human actions—eating, talking, walking, waiting—are so completely confined to an arbitrary grid of order, it’s like a physical incarnation of despair. A few minutes there; a quick walk here; a well-placed utilitarian exchange there. Indeed, Houellebecq’s “inkling that, more and more, the whole world would come to resemble an airport” is haunting, because it’s a vision of a meaninglessness, placeless, communion-less world.

This is the context in which the peculiar horror of The Waste Land—a horror that comes from emptiness—makes sense. (Read more.)