Tea at Trianon: ‘The Odyssey’: The Blueprint of a Civilization

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

Monday, July 20, 2026

‘The Odyssey’: The Blueprint of a Civilization

From Ekathimerini:

We tend to file “The Odyssey” under “mythology” – alongside stories of gods who never existed, sung by people trying to explain thunder. That filing is a mistake, and it obscures the single most consequential literary achievement in human history.

“The Odyssey” is not a myth. It is a founding document. It is the moment human beings first discovered that they had an inside – and it is the blueprint from which an entire civilization, and everything that civilization would eventually give the world, was built.

Read “The Iliad” closely and something strange emerges. Achilles does not decide to rage – rage arrives and moves through him like wind fills a sail. When a god speaks, the hero does not experience it as an outside voice interrupting his thoughts; the god’s command is his thought. Heroes act. They do not deliberate. There is no interior room where a self sits and weighs its options – there is only impulse, arriving as if from outside, and action following immediately after.

The Odyssey breaks this pattern, and the break is the whole point.

Odysseus pauses. He calculates. He lies, plots, improvises, disguises himself, and – for the first time in surviving literature – he talks to himself. Clinging to a rock through a violent night, he says: “Endure, my heart. You have endured worse than this.” That is not a god speaking through him. That is one part of a man addressing another part of the same man. It is the first recorded act of a human being holding itself together through interior dialogue.

Homer did not just tell a story about a man finding his way home. He recorded – perhaps without fully realizing it – the birth of human self-awareness. (Read more.)