It makes for an amazing disaster knight road trip.
(It also makes the places where he's not like that all the more effective. I love when he's retelling—speaking of—the story of the Sword in the Stone, because he's doing it in his usual irritable, slightly defensive way, blaming Arthur for bringing him the sword as if he didn't know its worth, and then it's as if he suddenly catches himself: "I was a young fool, too, at the time, not much older than Artus.")
The magical melancholia scene is just a paragraph but it's such a gut punch - especially because, as you say, he is right about how the future ages will remember him. He'll be oafish idiot Kay in the Disney Sword in the Stone.
When I was re-reading the novel earlier this year, I discovered that I had accurately remembered for more than thirty years (and coveted, are we kidding) the little silver knife set with a stoat's skull which Merlyn gives Kay, but I had completely forgotten the accompanying description of Kay as "not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it" and had to take, as one does, a moment of OW JESUS T. H. WHITE.
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It makes for an amazing disaster knight road trip.
(It also makes the places where he's not like that all the more effective. I love when he's retelling—speaking of—the story of the Sword in the Stone, because he's doing it in his usual irritable, slightly defensive way, blaming Arthur for bringing him the sword as if he didn't know its worth, and then it's as if he suddenly catches himself: "I was a young fool, too, at the time, not much older than Artus.")
The magical melancholia scene is just a paragraph but it's such a gut punch - especially because, as you say, he is right about how the future ages will remember him. He'll be oafish idiot Kay in the Disney Sword in the Stone.
When I was re-reading the novel earlier this year, I discovered that I had accurately remembered for more than thirty years (and coveted, are we kidding) the little silver knife set with a stoat's skull which Merlyn gives Kay, but I had completely forgotten the accompanying description of Kay as "not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it" and had to take, as one does, a moment of OW JESUS T. H. WHITE.