It has been a long time since that day in March when our country began to respond to the Covid-19 crisis. Since that day, many of us have not had physical human interaction with people who are important to us as family or friends. For me, a teacher, it also meant distancing myself from my students and fellows, with whom I learned every day, and from whom I derived emotional and intellectual sustenance. Sometimes one doesn’t realize how wonderful the swimming hole was until relocated to a desert. In addition to the challenges our secular version of monastic seclusion, we are all faced with a plethora of psychological challenges that press us psyche with the weight of stone, testing our breaking point. Coping mechanisms differ widely, but we all share the experience of needing those crutches support ourselves.  Anxiety and Depression run rampant among us, feeding like the gluttonous demons that they are, wreaking havoc on our vain attempts to safeguard Normalcy. We are living in a topsy-turvy world, in which Chaos nefariously erodes the sacred rites of Normalcy to make way for it’s children, Barbarism and Avarice:

One Hand a Mathematique Cristall swayes,
Which, gathering in one line a thousand rayes
From her bright eyes, Confusion burns to death,
And all estates of men distinguisheth.
By it Morallitie and Comelinesse
Themselves in all their slightly figures dresse.
Her other hand a laurel rod applies,
To beat back Barbarisme and Avarice,
That follow’d, eating earth and excrement
And human linbs; and would make proud ascent
To seates of gods, were Ceremonie slaine.

– Chapman: Hero and Leander, III, 131

It is as if Chapman, in the prophecy of poetry, foresaw our current age.

For those of us who read, it is not unusual to turn to the same book over and over again for comfort. We have read it, re-read it, memorize parts of it, and It still remains a source of solace. It is as if we are able to crawl within the covers to curl up seeking the refuge of warmth from a cold world. For me, that book is “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. My paperback edition is dog-eared, underlined, annotated, glossed, and book marked. In the places where it shows it’s age and fragility, it is taped. Like most sages, it is wrinkled and frail from age, but robustly filled with perspicacity and grace.

The quote for today:
“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 in your own 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 lesser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn.”

– T.H. White, The Once and Future King, Liber Primus, chapter 21