Saturday, August 14, 2010

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.

10 comments:

  1. Learning to plow can be a damned useful thing. With you on self-help books!

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  2. I've never read a self help book (and god knows I could use some help) because I hate them so much.... more so than I hate Dr. Phil.....

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  3. Beautiful and true. Just like you.

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  4. I'm sick of those books too. I recently subscribed to the blog of a sort-of friend of mine and every other day or so, it emails me the latest post and I have to go get an insulin shot. It's that sweet and gooey. It's not enough to tell people they're beautiful really, or wise (trust your inner wisdom) and all that. It's just empty puffery. Learn something? Right on!

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  5. i like self help books. the good ones have changed my life forever. but every human seems so differently constituted that i have never successfully injected a friend with the love of my own favorites.

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  6. was that person mad at you? Someone gave me a self-help book once for a birthday. I basically never spoke to her again.

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  7. I meant sharing and discussing sh with fellow junkies. I think I would be pretty offended if someone did that to me out of the blue. Especially someone gross. There was a guy at work I was vaguely friendly with, who gave me a Christmas card that said "I don't see why people think you are depressed--when all I see is a smile". Never spoke to him again.

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  8. I want to write a self help book but I don't know how to make - "Be your own goddammed hero" into a hundred and fifty pages.

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  9. Sometimes the best self-help books aren't self-help books at all.

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Who wants to fuck the Editors?