Learning is the thing for you.
I was tidying up today and came across my copy (right) of The Once and Future King by T.H. White. This comprises four novels and is a sort of re-telling of the Arthurian legends. I remember buying it when I was at school, at which time I was reading a lot of fantasy novels of the swords-and-sorcery type, but although it is a fantasy, this book was not at all what I anticipated. It’s very funny in places and also full of anachronisms. White uses the legend of King Arthur as a kind of metaphor or political allegory and his novels are only loosely based on the familar stories of Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. The first novel was first published as a standalone book in 1938…
Anyway, I kept this book intending to read it again but never got around to doing that. The edition I bought is in quite small type so I might find it a struggle now! I’ve kept it to one side, though, as I know a certain person whom I think will enjoy it and is young enough to still have good eyesight. I will give it to him when we next meet.
The other day somebody shared the following (wonderful) extract from the first novel, The Sword in the Stone, which is largely about the education of the young Arthur (known by his nickname “Wart”) by the wizard Merlyn. The quote remains extremely relevant today as an expression of the joy – which I wish more people shared – of learning for learning’s sake.
“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. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theo-criticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”
In the Dark 
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