Thoughts on The Sword in the Stone

Dan John is a person of many hats.

He is a gem in the dumpster fire that is the current fitness industry. One of his legacies will without a doubt be his infamous 10,000 kettlebell swing challenge, a month-long punishment for your grip and posterior chain. But Dan has authored a number of other books on training, coaching, and life based on his experiences in the highest levels of discus throwing and Olympic lifting.

Dan is also an academic. I don’t mean that he has a degree in kinesiology or whatever is trendy these days. He earned a master’s in religious studies as well as a Fulbright Scholarship to explore religious education abroad.

It’s difficult to not like Dan. I have been digesting a lot of his content lately, and his passion for T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone infected me.

The book features an orphan named Arthur, also known as The Wart, who lives with Sir Ector and Ector’s biological son, Kay, in medieval England’s Castle Sauvage. Kay trains to become a knight, while society relegates Wart to squire status. Wart meets a wizard living backwards in time, Merlyn, who becomes his tutor throughout the novel. Merlyn transforms Wart into various animals to teach lessons on education, sadness, self-discovery, and more.

Kay eventually becomes a knight, as expected. He heads to a tournament with Sir Ector, Wart, and others, and at the inn he forgets to bring his most important tool – his sword. Flustered, Wart discovers the inn is locked. He cannot retrieve Kay’s sword. Instead, Wart encounters a sword in a stone at a churchyard and emancipates it on his third attempt. Kay cannot repeat the feat, which, little did Wart know, would determine the deceased King Uther’s successor. Wart is crowned king, as he is Uther’s biological son.

The Sword in the Stone is a charming story filled with magic, humor, and tragedy. I did not expect to relate so much to Arthur.

My resonance with Wart emerged early, when White describes his relationship with Kay:

Kay insisted on carrying the goshawk and flying her, when they went out together. This he had a right to do, not only because he was older than the Wart but also because he was Sir Ector’s proper son. The Wart was not a proper son. He did not understand about this, but it made him feel unhappy, because Kay seemed to regard it as making him inferior in some way. Also it was different not having a father and mother, and Kay had taught him that being different was wrong. Nobody talked to him about it, but he thought about it when he was alone, and was distressed. He did not like people to bring it up. Since the other boy always did bring it up when a question of precedence arose, he had got into the habit of giving in at once before it could be mentioned.

I knew I was adopted as long as I can remember. My parents never hid that from me, thankfully. But they urged me to never reveal that information to my peers. Why was being different wrong? Was I inferior? I could not understand. Already I was plagued with an existential crisis from an early age.

One day I let it slip. It was third grade on the playground. I cannot remember why I said it. All I remember was the seconds of silence that dragged on for an eternity. I was playing with only two girls, yet it felt like I disclosed my unworthiness to the whole world. One kid referred to me as “the girl from Asia” for a couple weeks. Besides planting the seeds for my personal distress, this experience was a brain teaser, as I grappled with deciding whether Russia was in Europe or Asia.

I doubt my parents ever knew this happened. From then onwards I mostly kept quiet but thought about it when I was alone, like Arthur. I understand they wanted to protect me from such interactions, but the topic also felt taboo at home. The cherry on top was when I overcame my fear in bringing up the topic and asked if I could start searching for answers about my personal history. Nothing made me feel more alien than my parents' reluctance, especially after witnessing my mother for years assembling her own genetic puzzle pieces and claiming she had “royal blood.”

After many adventures, the time has come for Kay to realize his knighthood, which stings Wart yet again thanks to his illegitimacy. Wart turns to Merlyn for aid. Arthur learns to cope with his despair by learning:

“The best thing for disturbances of the spirit,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn. 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 and lose your moneys to a monster, 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 the poor 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 million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theo-criticism and geography and history and economics, why, you can start to make a cart wheel 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 plough."

Existential anguish has haunted me since my preteen years, mostly kept to myself. But education has always been there for me; it is one of few things I can trust will never leave or make me feel inferior. I never put one academic discipline on a pedestal above the rest. As a first generation college student, I crave a general sense of being educated. I think this is why I appreciate a liberal arts, “generalist” approach to education, despite currently pursuing a PhD. I find solace in philosophy, foreign languages, environmental science, classic literature, and history – everything, really. I know I cannot become an expert in everything. There is not enough time. That certainty is far more comforting than disappointing.

Education, while comforting in face of my limited self-knowledge, is still painful at times. It can be lonely.

Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.

Wart does not realize his potential and true identity, pulling the sword from the stone, without self-reliance. In primary school I had to rely on myself from an early age, as my parents could no longer help me with homework after third grade or so. This was not the case for many of my peers. My family could not help me with middle school geometry let alone college admissions. If I wanted to learn, it was up to me alone.

I learned things the hard way. There were so many things I did not know that I did not know: that I should attend office hours to develop relationships with my professors, how to actually study, and when and where I could get involved in a research lab. Many things I learned late but not too late, granting me confidence to navigate graduate school admissions as a fourth year undergraduate thrown in a university whose students' parents often held not only bachelor’s but also higher degrees.

Self-reliance is not restricted to my plunge into academia. Advanced genetic technologies cannot relieve me from the most tormenting questions of my family history, whose answers only I can parse by teaching myself Russian and becoming my own detective. Solo travel also enlightens me, whether it be moving to a new city by myself, flying across the country without a guide, or learning a public transit system like the back of my hand.

I pursue higher education not for fame or wealth but rather to make myself less of a stranger.