Sparkle, BEGIN

I finished The Once and Future King last night.
It fits our own times well, as we see cruelty normalized (it's not normal!) and feel the ground under democracy rumble--again.
(T. H. White wrote his novel's four parts between 1938 and 1958.)

 White's ending is grim, yet bracing. With the Round Table split and knowing that Camelot and his loves are destroyed [sorry if this is a SPOILER, man],
King Arthur puts the dreadful loss and his own failure and death in perspective:

"The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea."

It's put more joyously put in the movie, Camelot, where Richard Harris as Arthur says:
"But it seems that some of the drops sparkle. Some of them do sparkle!"––and he calls to the boy he has sent away to survive to tell the story, "Run boy!"
(I couldn't stand to watch this schlocky movie again, though I loved it at sixteen.)

The book is weirdly, realistically hopeful too (in a large-scheme-of-things way). The last words we read are, "THE BEGINNING".
So we are charged, like the boy, "to be careful of yourself... to remember that you are a kind of vessel to carry on the idea, when things go wrong...."

Arthur is old at the end of the book--you don't get that sense in the movie--so here's a photo of the old Richard Harris.

(Not that old--Harris was only 72 when he died. You may remember he had to be replaced as Professor Dumbledore (like Merlyn, a gray-bearded teaching magician). His granddaughter had said she would never speak to him again if he turned down the Harry Potter role.)
[--Review of documentary The Ghost of Richard Harris]

Here're the final paragraphs of The Once and Future King.
Arthur has been despairing, but after he sends the boy away from the fighting, to live to tell the tale of Camelot...

"The old King felt refreshed, clear-headed, almost ready to begin again. 
There would be a day––there must be a day––when he would come back with a new Round Table which had no corners, just as the world had none---a table without boundaries...

The hope of making it would lie in culture. If people could be persuaded to read and write, not just to eat and make love, there was still a chance that they might come to reason.

But it was too late for another effort then. For that time it was his destiny to die, or, as some say, to be carried off to Avilion, where he could wait for better days. ...
The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.

The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.

EXPLICIT LIBER REGIS QUONDAM REGISQUE FUTURI
[the end of the book the once and future king]

THE BEGINNING"
________________

I take heart from this. Times are dangerous, life is fleeting.
As Sparkle Queen Linda Sue might say,
Put some glitter on it!