The Wise Owl and I have been enjoying The Once and Future King together. She's posted one of her favorite short quotes from the book.
It is a great book for reading out loud, whether short bits or long sections of it. Not every book that reads well silently also reads well aloud, but this one does.
I'm going to post my favorite short quote here. Of course it is Merlyn speaking:
"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 my 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 theocriticism and geography 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."
The book was published in the 1950's, but it would be a mistake to think of it as old-fashioned, or, worse, only for children. People often look back at those who lived in earlier times -- especially times before they were born -- and think that those earlier people are somehow less intelligent or savvy than the present-day people.
Privately, though, I think that the earlier people, if they could see the world today, would marvel at how little -- almost nothing, in fact -- we of today have managed to learn from their hard experiences of being people who lived and struggled in the world, despite our ubiquitous cell phones and instant messaging.
7:58:53 AM 
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