Virginia Tech Tragedy - Resources, Responses - "Learning Cures Sadness" (90 seconds MP3)

1. Request from Sally Gilbert of TLT Group for resources in response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech this week; and
2. "Learning Cures Sadness" - Response from Steve Gilbert

Also see: Link to Web page for FridayLive! special session "Staying Sane - in Insane Times."

Email message from Sally Gilbert:
"We're all struggling to understand what happened at Virginia Tech this week and to do whatever we can to support our friends at Virginia Tech...

"We've started a web page to compile resources to share and which might also be helpful to others. http://www.tltgroup.org/VaTechresources.htm

"If you have something you'd like us to add to the webpage, please send it to Sally Gilbert
sallygilbert@tltgroup.org"

Or add your contribution (comment, question, reference or resource) as a comment to this posting - click on "comments" at the bottom of this posting, below. You do NOT need to have a Blogger account. You are welcome to add your name and contact information if you wish.

Steve Gilbert's response to Sally's request: "Learning Cures Sadness"
Here is one of my favorite quotations - about "Learning Cures Sadness." As one of Merlyn’s responsibilities for raising the boy who is destined to become the king of England, he advises the young King Arthur about coping with frustration and sadness. From T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Berkeley Medallion Edition, July, 1966, page 183.

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See below for other media options. Here's the text:

"'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 of your 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 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. 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 is it is time to learn to plough.'"

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