“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s 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 only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
       — T.H. White, The Once and Future King

T.H. White is one of my favourite writers. It’s easy to be dismissive of The Once and Future King, based on the Disney adaptation—which, like their version of The Jungle Books, is great fun but a travesty of the original. However, as I hope the extract shows, there’s rather more to him than that.

My favourite chapter in the book was the one dealing with the night Wart spent in the castle mews with the falcons and the baleful nightmare, Cully. Ever since I read it I’ve been fascinated by falconry—I’ll know I’ve made my fortune when I can retire to a large house in the country and keep and become a falconer. I mentioned this to Gill shortly after we met and she pressed The Goshawk on me. Wow. This is a fabulously written account of White’s attempts to train a Goshawk using a medieval textbook as his guide (even when he wrote the book, the profession had moved on a great deal, but White didn’t know that). It’s been described by austringers as the ideal ‘how not to' book. But you don’t read it for the techniques, you read it for White’s perfect prose, for the boundless patience of the man and the seemingly boundless stubbornness of the bloodyminded Cully. I’ve flown a Harris Hawk on a course that Gill arranged for my birthday one year. Walking around with a hawk on your fist, calmly talking to it and getting it used to you is (for me) an indescribable experience; the best I can do is point at The Goshawk and say “Read that!”

I wish I could say that Merlin’s speech branded itself on my brain when I first read it around 25 years ago, but sadly, I can’t. It only had that effect when I logged into my Linux box one morning and my standard .profile ran fortune and up it popped. Merlin’s dead right you know, the process of learning things is the finest pill to purge melancholy I know. At my father-in-law’s funeral, we took that passage and had it printed up on cards for the mourners, and Gill used it as a reading. Everyone who knew him remarked on how appropriate and cheering it was. I hope that it will be just as appropriate a reading for me when my time comes.