The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.
—
T. H. White, The Once and Future King, a book I have liked a great deal so far (and which, have I mentioned this already, I have a hard time not viewing, in its first section, through the lens of my memories of Disney’s The Sword and the Stone, which is an odd enough phenomenon but one that will probably only get worse when I move onto later adult portions of Wart’s Arthur’s life and begin to view the book through the lens of Monty Python…).
Cart-before-horse cultural-reference navigation aside, the book has its little oddities. At 180 pages in, I’ve read at least three separate offhand bits premised on just how bloody awful those savage American Indians are, something that I don’t know enough of about T. H. White to sort into the sincere vs. the ironic. But 1939 was borderline medieval on a lot of civil-rights fronts, so it’s hard not to think the worst.
Cf. Lovecraft et al, granting “a product of their times” as more the explanation than “he was a bad man” even in the worst case scenario, but it’s a jarring little break now and then in a book otherwise so clever and in a lot of ways dedicated to Merlyn’s self-awareness about the great changes time has wrought (whether you account for it forwards or backwards) on the perceptions of man and the quality of eddication.
