Merlyn's Advice on What to Do When the World Gets You Down – The Marginalian
For his good contribution to The Speed of Life: Books for the Young ReaderYo-Yo Ma tells children how books helped her survive her childhood, listing King Arthur among her three greatest heroes; as a young boy born in France to Chinese parents, trying to find his place as an immigrant in America, he found great comfort and inspiration in the stories of the famous medieval leader – stories of “adventure, heroism, human frailty and fate” that gave him the courage to believe in the power of seeking to find sacred things and dreams that cannot be dreamed as dreams that cannot be fulfilled. the greatest cellist in the world.
And, indeed, buried within the adventure-joy of these Arthurian legends are a wealth of wisdom about strength, courage, and the art of noble life, nowhere richer than in the novels. TH White (May 29, 1906–January 17, 1964), one episode that provides a meta-testament to the power of learning in the creation of the character of King Arthur himself.
In White's 1958 Arthurian classic The King of Once and Tomorrow (public library) – one of Ursula K. Le Guin's favorite books – the sorceress Merlyn, who knows about the fate of the young King Arthur, tries to mold the boy's morals and teach him what it means to be a strong, kind leader by using a series of lessons from the animal kingdom, to transform him, fish, hak, hak, hak, hak, fish, hak, hak, hak, goose, hak, hak, hak, fish and hak. corn. One day, young Arthur comes to Merlyn in the form of a normal human, full of normal human disappointment – that little mallet, merciless for our weaknesses. Merlyn offers his advice on a powerful antidote to disappointment and grief:
The best thing about being sad… is learning something. That is the only thing that will never fail. You may grow old and tremble in your body, you may lie awake at night listening to your nerves, you may miss your one love, you may see the world about you destroyed by evil lunatics, or you may know your reputation is being trampled down the drains of a dirty mind. There is only one thing you can do about it – study. Learn why the earth moves and what moves it. It is the only thing that the mind can never weaken, never divide, never abuse, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regret.
In a poignant sense of astrologer Maria Mitchell's comment that “we have a mental hunger for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the greater our desire,” Merlyn adds:
Look at how many things you can learn – pure science, the only pure there is. You can read astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, six books. And then, after you are tired of a million lives in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start making a wagon wheel from the right wood, or spend fifty years learning to start learning to beat your enemy at the fence. After that you can start again in math, until it's time to learn to farm.
Train Rebecca Solnit – the modern magic of storytelling – on how books comfort, empower, and transform us, philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human weaknesses, and poet Mary Oliver on the great antidote to grief, then revisit Bruce Lee's philosophy of reading, Lewisin Carroll directs his son Albert's advice on his four laws of reading. the secret to learning anything.
