by Zoë Pollock
In an interview about her recent book on grieving Meghan O’Rourke quotes T.H. White’s The Book of Merlin:
The best thing for being sad 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 about 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 the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust and never dream of regretting.
She took his advice to heart:
One thing that happens with loss is that I think people feel — I know I felt — the utter fragility of the world. I felt like it could all disappear at any time. Learning became the stay against that. I ended up feeling there was one thing the world couldn’t take away and that was my curiosity, my desire to understand. I just ended up reading and trying to learn. It was a recuperative thing in the midst of all this pain.
The Dish 