Self Help

Someone told me recently I should read a self help book. Anything that labels itself a self-help book, to my mind, is a scab on the soul of mankind, and I'm allergic to them. The lot of them might as well be called "Stephen King had a baby with Dr. Phil, and they locked her in the basement and raised her feral with no human contact or knowledge of utensils, but as long as she knows she's good enough, it'll be okay." Or whatever a shorter version of that might be. Here then is a passage from my personal self-help book.



"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to blow and puff, "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 in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world around 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 that 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 it is time to learn to plough."

T.H.White, The Once and Future King.