This Is Almost Certainly A Post Ive Made Before But When A Character's Grief Is So Strong It Fully Alters

harrow the ninth is really like. what if orpheus didn't turn around. what if he wasn't going to turn around. what if he kept his face pointed resolutely ahead and trusted that she was there even not knowing what he was hoping for. what if orpheus had to be cajoled and threatened and eventually forced to turn around. what if eurydice hadn't been told the rules and also had a crippling fear of abandonment and spent the whole time pleading with him to look at her. what if orpheus trusted that she would follow him but eurydice couldn't trust that he would care. what if orpheus was told point-blank that eurydice was almost certainly not actually behind him and he chose to keep walking anyway. what if eurydice touched sunlight again and orpheus wasn't there. what then.

The Queen is Britain’s last living link with our former greatness – the nation’s id, its problematic self-regard – which is still defined by our victory in the second world war. One leading historian, who like most people I interviewed for this article declined to be named, stressed that the farewell for this country’s longest-serving monarch will be magnificent. “Oh, she will get everything,” he said. “We were all told that the funeral of Churchill was the requiem for Britain as a great power. But actually it will really be over when she goes.”

Unlike the US presidency, say, monarchies allow huge passages of time – a century, in some cases – to become entwined with an individual. The second Elizabethan age is likely to be remembered as a reign of uninterrupted national decline, and even, if she lives long enough and Scotland departs the union, as one of disintegration. Life and politics at the end of her rule will be unrecognisable from their grandeur and innocence at its beginning. “We don’t blame her for it,” Philip Ziegler, the historian and royal biographer, told me. “We have declined with her, so to speak.”

The obituary films will remind us what a different country she inherited. One piece of footage will be played again and again: from her 21st birthday, in 1947, when Princess Elizabeth was on holiday with her parents in Cape Town. She was 6,000 miles from home and comfortably within the pale of the British Empire. The princess sits at a table with a microphone. The shadow of a tree plays on her shoulder. The camera adjusts three or four times as she talks, and on each occasion, she twitches momentarily, betraying tiny flashes of aristocratic irritation. “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service, and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong,” she says, enunciating vowels and a conception of the world that have both vanished.

It is not unusual for a country to succumb to a state of denial as a long chapter in its history is about to end. When it became public that Queen Victoria was dying, at the age of 82, a widow for half her life, “astonished grief … swept the country”, wrote her biographer, Lytton Strachey. In the minds of her subjects, the queen’s mortality had become unimaginable; and with her demise, everything was suddenly at risk, placed in the hands of an elderly and untrusted heir, Edward VII. “The wild waters are upon us now,” wrote the American Henry James, who had moved to London 30 years before.

The parallels with the unease that we will feel at the death of Elizabeth II are obvious, but without the consolation of Britain’s status in 1901 as the world’s most successful country. “We have to have narratives for royal events,” the historian told me. “In the Victorian reign, everything got better and better, and bigger and bigger. We certainly can’t tell that story today.”

The result is an enormous objection to even thinking about – let alone talking or writing about – what will happen when the Queen dies. We avoid the subject as we avoid it in our own families. It seems like good manners, but it is also fear. The reporting for this article involved dozens of interviews with broadcasters, government officials, and departed palace staff, several of whom have worked on London Bridge directly. Almost all insisted on complete secrecy. “This meeting never happened,” I was told after one conversation in a gentleman’s club on Pall Mall. Buckingham Palace, meanwhile, has a policy of not commenting on funeral arrangements for members of the royal family.

And yet this taboo, like much to do with the monarchy, is not entirely rational, and masks a parallel reality. The next great rupture in Britain’s national life has, in fact, been planned to the minute. It involves matters of major public importance, will be paid for by us, and is definitely going to happen. According to the Office of National Statistics, a British woman who reaches the age of 91 – as the Queen will in April – has an average life expectancy of four years and three months. The Queen is approaching the end of her reign at a time of maximum disquiet about Britain’s place in the world, at a moment when internal political tensions are close to breaking her kingdom apart. Her death will also release its own destabilising forces: in the accession of Queen Camilla; in the optics of a new king who is already an old man; and in the future of the Commonwealth, an invention largely of her making. (The Queen’s title of “Head of the Commonwealth” is not hereditary.) Australia’s prime minister and leader of the opposition both want the country to become a republic.

Coping with the way these events fall is the next great challenge of the House of Windsor, the last European royal family to practise coronations and to persist – with the complicity of a willing public – in the magic of the whole enterprise. That is why the planning for the Queen’s death and its ceremonial aftermath is so extensive. Succession is part of the job. It is an opportunity for order to be affirmed. Queen Victoria had written down the contents of her coffin by 1875. The Queen Mother’s funeral was rehearsed for 22 years. Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, prepared a winter and a summer menu for his funeral lunch. London Bridge is the Queen’s exit plan. “It’s history,” as one of her courtiers said. It will be 10 days of sorrow and spectacle in which, rather like the dazzling mirror of the monarchy itself, we will revel in who we were and avoid the question of what we have become.

‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death

maybe not the absolute best thing about les miserables the novel (it’s a long book) but the one that stood out the most to me and has remained with me most strongly is that when the book is explaining to us the plight of fantine, who basically like finds herself poor and knocked up bc iirc she hooked up with some fuckboy who was never gonna stick around, victor hugo really takes pains to be clear that fantine did a lot of really dumb shit. she made stupid ass choices. she was naive and impulsive and unwise and myopic. it’s not a story where a tragic heroine did everything right and still got screwed. but the moral argument put forth by, i mean, to some degree the entire novel but particularly (to my recollection) by this section is essentially like, isn’t it so fucked up that we live in a society where someone can be functionally condemned to a life of suffering for the crime of being a fallible human being in their youth? isn’t being young and stupid and getting to move on from that a human right that we are denying people? shouldn’t you be allowed to be kind of an idiot without ruining your entire life? it’s such a clearly and expansively empathetic view and it’s an idea that people obviously continue to struggle with based on Any Time Anything Happens Ever and also one that i feel like continues to be rare in narrative art or media, at least expressed this fully or strongly.

tlt characters as cats....

one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you’re going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you’ll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you’ll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar’s history, you’ll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as “guys” and “boys”, you’ll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have “he / him” painted on his chest, and you’ll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you’ll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how “problematic” it all was and it’s honestly tragic

In another lifetime

kirionagaia.jpeg

harrowhark’s little raccoon hands……….

Oh, and by the way, that Supreme Court ruling is where that Harry Potter money goes.