Learning is the Thing for You

Let's keep learning alive in an era when knowledge is vilified, ignorance is glorified, and wisdom is in short supply...

Photo: An unattributed image of Merlyn and Arthur from a Reddit puzzle thread.

I. In my mid-twenties, I read T. H. White’s novel, The Once and Future King, his 1958 retelling of the legend of King Arthur. Early in the story, Merlyn the Wizard takes the young Arthur under his wing, knowing that Arthur will someday become King. In the quote below, he’s helping his young ward deal with some deep sadness. Merlyn’s words have stayed with me for sixty years, though it took a couple of decades to understand what they meant for me in practice:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn … “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 around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor 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.”

II. As life eroded my youthful pretensions, learning became my path to wholeness. I don’t mean the kind of learning that leads to a credential or a job, nor did Merlyn. I mean the kind that evokes the soul, that helps us find our way through suffering, our own and others’, that opens our eyes to life’s vitality and exuberance. I mean the kind of learning we need to stay whole in barbaric times such as our own, as we watch “the world around [us] devastated by evil lunatics,” and feel our own identity and integrity, and that of people we love, “trampled in the sewers of baser minds.”

From mid-life onward, I’ve learned: •…to keep life in perspective by spending time in the natural world. • …to navigate hard times by talking with friends who know how to listen, ask open questions, and “hear me into speech.” • …to see into my inner turmoil by spending time in silence and solitude, letting the roiled waters settle until the source of the trouble becomes clear. • …to feel more at home in the human world by embracing the “booming, buzzing confusion” of a diverse community. • …to value creative conflict by working with others to develop a project or help shape an institution. • …to grow by examining my failures for clues about my illusions.

III. I’ve learned from books, too, of course. But I’ve cut back on the academic works I had to master in college and grad school. Instead, I read the poets, novelists and inner-life spelunkers who explore life’s imponderables, the big questions about living and dying that become more urgent as we age.

I don’t look to these writers for answers, and they don’t provide them. They follow Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell the truth, but tell it slant,” the kind of truth that’s so vast, elusive and mind-blowing that it can be glimpsed only out of the corner of the eye. The writers I love leave me with questions, the life-giving questions Rilke advised us to embrace so that we might “live along some distant day into the answer.”

IV. I’ve learned from writing as well as reading books. People who teach writing often tell students to write what they know. For me, writing has never been about downloading what I know onto the blank page. Instead, writing is another path to discovery, a way of learning more about myself and the world. I write about what I don’t understand, using language to peel back layer after layer of experience until I get to a place where I can say, “I’ve gone as far as I can go. Let’s call it a book!”

I’m convinced that I was born baffled, and I’ve never stopped being baffled. Every book I’ve written helped me gain more clarity about something big that puzzles me. But it has also taken me to the next layer of bafflement, eventually yielding another round of writing, which I’m now doing with short-form essays on Substack. No more book-length marathons for me!

V. Learning comes in many forms, and in different forms to different people. But there’s a red thread that runs through all of them, I think. They all demand that we pay attention to the world and to ourselves. As Mary Oliver said, “This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” That’s why the kind of learning I’m talking about evokes the soul—it’s learning that expands and deepens our appreciation of life.

Oliver’s famous poem, “The Summer Day,” includes one of the finest examples of attentiveness I’ve ever seen, the kind that takes us deeper into the miracle of life by attending to its infinite variety of stunning details:

Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

Yours truly reading poetry on the edge of the BWCA. Photo by Sharon L. Palmer.

VI. Is the kind of learning Merlyn advocates relevant to resisting the political catastrophe called MAGA? Absolutely. That’s why MAGA is dead-set against learning of all sorts. They favor indoctrination over education, conspiracy theories over facts and reason, and are intent on bringing down the public media, libraries and public schools and universities that have helped millions learn to value learning.

They’re doing this not just because they hate exposure and love “low-information” voters. They’re afraid of life. They’re afraid of history, so they try to rewrite it. They’re afraid of what’s happening in the world around them, so they try to wall it off. They’re afraid of the voice of truth that’s trying to rise up within them, so they try to drown it out. Driven by fear, MAGA devotees put their trust in sociopathic thugs who say they know everything, and promise to shut life down and make America “safe” for white people again. The MAGA project will fail in the long run because you can’t control life—but we will pay a great price before that day comes. We who love life must do what we can to hasten MAGA’s demise.

VII. Our capacity to deal with political challenges depends heavily on what we pay attention to. We need to be informed about the news of the world, of course. But if we pay most attention to the toxic news that comes our way every day, we will sicken ourselves. By giving more attention to the uprisings of life in our midst—including the courageous resistance of those who refuse to be cowed into submission—we will find the will to join the resistance.

As important as honest journalism is, a nonstop diet of the news of the day is not the kind of learning that will give us life. We would do well, instead, to heed the poet William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there.” His words are enigmatic, yes, but so is life! For evidence of the truth of what he says, read almost anything Mary Oliver wrote.

VIII. I could go on, but it’s time to ponder my next bafflement. So I’ll close with a Memo to Self:

Stay on the alert for teachable moments in your life, moments when vulnerability opens you to deep learning. Never be embarrassed to have to learn the same thing again, because each time you re-learn it, the learning reaches deeper down: intend it or not, you’re practicing what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” Finally, let Merlyn’s words take you to the end of life, because there is no end to learning.

[NOTES: My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post.]