… this New York Times editorial. “Prince Harry and Meghan should not be lamented as defectors from the old order, but celebrated as the heroes of the next installment, as modern royals renouncing some level of privilege to seek their fortune in the real world,” the NYT writes; and it’s as Katherine Anne Porter says in her great short story, “Holiday”:
[A]ll my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness. … I learned finally [to] take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. … We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours… and if we don’t run from the others, we are fools.
Whatever becomes of these two, their story so far is about the guts and clarity to free oneself from a destructive life narrative that someone else has laid out for you. But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king, says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, as he taps his head. Mind-forg’d manacles are no joke, okay? Imagine how powerful they are when they’re royal. Nothing wrong, UD thinks, with being led to some extent in your life by the title of Graham Greene’s memoir: Ways of Escape.
January 13th, 2020 at 10:36AM
The NYT, as usual, is full of shit. They’re renouncing “some level of privilege,” but keeping most of it and ginning up even more with their antics. When Megan Simpson or Wallis Markle or whoever she is and Prince Whoever shed their millions and move into a council flat in Manchester, I will take this seriously.