"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 theocriticism 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 is it is time to learn to plough."
I like this fragment a lot because of two main reasons:
- On the one hand, I like it as an exaltation of the virtues of knowledge and learning, since the text can ultimately be seen as an ode to the beauty of wanting to learn something new everyday. I like both the humbleness and the spirit of non-conformity that are implied. I agree with the vision of knowledge as a noble quest and I agree with the line of thought according to which knowledge itself can never be bad. What we do with that knowledge can indeed be right or wrong, but that is a completely different debate. Knowledge itself broadens our minds and enlarges our choices, therefore enhancing our freedom. Thus, it can only be good.
- On the other hand, I like the fact that the text encourages the adoption of an active role when faced with difficulties. If you are feeling sad, the last thing you should do is waste a single minute feeling miserable, commiserating yourself, paralyzed by fear and regrets. Instead, you should stand up and get moving. Explore new realities. Discover new options. Learn something new. Become the light at the end of you own tunnel. Or as our friend Andy might have put it, simply get "busy living".
