T.H. White’s The Once and Future King offers excellent advice about how to fight off despair: learn something. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Learning Fights Off Despair”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
In his 1958 book, The Once and Future King, T.H. White did a kind of retelling of some of the King Arthur stories. And there’s a passage from it that really spoke to me. And it goes like this.
The best thing for being sad 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 honor 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.
That’s beautiful.
Yeah, there’s something so heartening about that. It’s a reminder to me that there’s always something more to learn. As much as we learn every week on the show from our listeners and from our research, there’s always more to learn.
And I like it as a replacement for worrying about the things that aren’t going quite right around you because the learning doesn’t have to be interrupted by the body having issues or the relationships kind of going south.
It reminds me of something that I experienced as a kid, less so today, where I realized that it would be a couple hours until dinner, but I was hungry and there was no snacking allowed. And I realized I could read a book instead and it would fill me up and satisfy me in a way that almost was like food.
And then when dinner came, I was fine. But I figured out that sometimes when I was tired and couldn’t sleep, the book didn’t put me to sleep, but it made me comfortable and ready to sleep, if that makes sense.
So the learning is very similar to that.
It does. It fills you up.
It fills you up.
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