Tea at Trianon: The Necessity of Mourning

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, February 5, 2023

The Necessity of Mourning

From The Angelus:

The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us that to everything in life there is a season, and an appointed time for every human experience. Our ancestors understood this — they lived the rhythms of life and respected them, their livelihoods tied to the harvests or the tides. They lived patiently attuned to the muffled cadences of their hearts, both the glad tempos and the dirges.

Today it is harder for us to accept the true fullness of human experience, the wide breadth of the seasons of life. We live in rigidly controlled environments, our thermostats set to 73 degrees in summer and winter, our pantries full of the same food the year round. We think we can do the same to our hearts, living narrowly only the experiences we crave, like love’s embrace or at the very least the steady hum of a cheerful, active life. The gloomy seasons we reject as unhealthy or morbid, and we seek the therapist’s couch when a swamping tide of loss or grief doesn’t recede at once.

The experience we fear the most is that of death, with its awful finality and hideous separation. And yet death is embedded in life, here to stay. With all our scientific progress we have not been able to extend our lifespan at all, let alone begin to see a way to achieve the pipedreams of billionaires who have poured their capital into “solving” death.

What we have been able to do is to mute death — compartmentalize it, box it in, marginalize it, remove it from our sight — as we’ve done with many of our cemeteries and funeral homes. Our old people die in hospices, with trained assistants to sedate them on their way, and are rushed to the crematorium when their souls have barely fled. Ashes are scattered in bodies of water, while wakes and funeral rites have been replaced by “celebrations of life.” We are encouraged to celebrate immediately, because grief hurts and what hurts has no business interrupting the cheerful tempo of our modern lives. (Read more.)