There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only in the middle of life, a sense of balance develops--not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often.
This knowledge of the world, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification, and hypocrisy--this is not a matter for triumph. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do. We forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. There were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
All these feelings fade away when we get knowledge of the world. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our knowledge of the world.
--T.H.WHITE,
The Once and Future King