Tea at Trianon: An Eternal Song: Remembering ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’

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

Thursday, July 11, 2024

An Eternal Song: Remembering ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’

From Bethel McGrew:

Monte Cassino, February 15, 1944. For Allied forces seeking a path to Rome, the holy building on the hill was an immovable obstacle. On each side of it stretched the Gustav Line, 161 kilometers from the Tyrrhenian Coast to the Adriatic. From it, you could see Highway 6. Within its walls, 230 Italian souls took refuge. At headquarters, British Commander-in-Chief Sir Harold Alexander received intel that it had been occupied by the Germans. The order came down: Launch the planes.
So it was that on a cold winter morning, in the blink of an eye, an ancient abbey died. Among the pilots who dropped the bombs was one Walter M. Miller Jr.
The phrase “PTSD” was not in vogue at Miller’s time. In retrospect, it’s clear that he suffered from it, as well as from clinical depression. His war experience didn’t immediately inspire A Canticle for Leibowitz, but as he was drafting a pivotal scene at the end of the novel, he realized it had been hovering over his work the whole time. “Good God,” he remembered thinking, “What have I been writing?” (Read more.)