Trampling Down The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden

It is Tuesday, and in a matter of hundreds of hours there will be a royal wedding. Have been studiously avoiding the subject, even though, being a devoted Anglophile, it would normally be the kind of thing about which I would be relentlessly chattering. But I’m just gonna come out and say it, the death of virtue is kind of a drag.

Way back in whatever year it was that Katherine and William got married, I had friends arrive at my door (by invitation) at 4am, one of them in fascinator. Together over tea and scones we devoured the whole wedding in rapt joy. I adored the towering verdant leafy trees down the center aisle, the sweeping music, the dress, and Literally Everything. It was as marvelous as Fergie in her fantastic 80s poof on an Italian Cafe TV, Italian commentators split screening their own sketches—while the ceremony was going on—of what they thought the dress should have been.

Let me just age myself, I can taste even now at this early morning hour the celebratory hamburger and french fries, the hunching over along with the wide world, in front of a little screen, the mute adoration as Princess Di floated down the aisle in that rapturous dreamy concoction. When she died, and I heard about it on NPR at 6 in the morning, I called my then boyfriend who was alarmed to hear my sorrow over something so inconsequential to my own sphere of life and person. In other words, I have some cred. I have done my time royal watching. I have put in solid, real life time hours wedding obsessing. I may not be an expert, but I am a devoted amateur.

And, I should say, I do think Meghan is stunning, in a hardened worldly sort of way. And Harry is adorbs. When he had that embarrassing episode in Vegas I totes averted my eyes and reminded myself that he had been awesome in Afghanistan and boys will be boys, or young men, and that (as I learned just today) if testosterone is measured in beer, two gallons of the stuff washes over the brain of a young man a day. It may be that a strengthening female will be just the ticket. I am more than prepared to be forgiving.

But the whole wedding thing has kind of died for me. The cynicism of modern life has trampled down The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden, has hindered the enthralled rush for the silver fish slice.

And that’s because marriage just doesn’t mean anything any more. We are left with an opulent outward form, but nothing at the core. The shriveled and drying roots produce no sap, no life. There remains no wellspring to sustain any substantial beauty. It is like my gorgeous, but dying, flowering tree out front. Each petal is achingly beautiful, but the tree perishes by inches. Amongst the blossoms are myriad bare twigs. Even a solid prune, which I am seriously going to attempt, probably can’t save the tree from creeping death. Its core just isn’t good any more.

Whence the breathless wonder about Meghan and Harry? I have already seen pictures of their fashionable cottage where they live together. I have squinted over pictures of her ex. I have read the lists of ways she has already broken all the rules. I have even heard the preacher—he wields the words of faith, and means none of them.

To quote my child, ‘If everyone is special, no one is.’ If everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, sexual experience, habit, manner of life, and belief can enter into “Christian” marriage, well, then no one can. It ceases to have any meaning, any purpose, any beauty.

Ah well, what was I doing? Looking at the shoes of Kate? The smocking of Princess Charlotte? The hat of the queen? Maybe those will be enough. Let me eat cake and rearrange these deck chairs. I think they will look well facing out, looking out over the rising tide, the lapping water.