Ignorance Is Bliss?

I just looked up the origin of this famous saying--and realized, once I'd done so, that I'd once known it. From a poem by Thomas Gray, 1716-71. (Link to entire poem, "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.") The famous part occurs in the final stanza:

To each his suff'rings: all are men,

         Condemn'd alike to groan,

The tender for another's pain;

         Th' unfeeling for his own.

Yet ah! why should they know their fate?

Since sorrow never comes too late,

         And happiness too swiftly flies.

Thought would destroy their paradise.

No more; where ignorance is bliss,

          Tis folly to be wise.

I should say that I first met Gray back in my senior year at Hiram (Ohio) High School (1961-62), when our English teacher, Mrs. Davis, required us to memorize some of Gray’s "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." I just looked again at the poem, and I think she asked us to memorize only the opening stanza--or maybe that's all I got around to? (It's the only part that seems ... intimately familiar.)

Here's that opening stanza:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

         The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

         And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Anyway, the Eton poem about ignorance and bliss is a dark one. The speaker is looking over the school at Eton, a prep school near Windsor (Percy Bysshe Shelley attended it--unhappily so), and when I visited Windsor back in the 1990s, I took some pictures of the school--which I'll try to find before I post this.

The speaker is talking about how naive the young are--how they can't imagine things growing darker in their lives. And so we see the relevance of the ignorance is bliss line.

I sort of agree.

When you don't know what's coming--what dark thing is coming--you can be, well, blissful. I think about my childhood, about a time when all the family deaths and tragedies lay so far ahead that I thought they would never happen. Certainly not to us!

But, of course, they did. So many of the people I adored in boyhood are gone now. So many classmates, friends, colleagues, former students. It's impossible to be blissful when the memories of those losses rise up at night, when all those people continue to populate my memory and dreams, when I realize now more clearly than ever before that I will join them. And not far in the future, either ...

But in another way, I do not believe that ignorance is bliss. In fact, the older I've gotten, the more I've been frustrated with my ignorance--even angry about it.

Every time I read a book (and many of you know that I read a lot of them), I am annoyed to discover all the things that I don't know--and (worse) the things that I will probably never know.

Every book I read informs me about another book I should read--or books I should read. In a way it's exciting (still so much to learn out there!), but it's also depressing (of all those things to learn out there, I am barely going to skim the surface of them).

When I finished reading all the novels and travel books of Charles Dickens some decades ago, I remember thinking: Okay, that's done!

But then I moved on to Anthony Trollope, Tobias Smollett, William Makepeace Thackeray--and now I'm nearing the end of my journey through Wilkie Collins' novels. And when I do (if I do), I know that there are countless others waiting in line. Impatiently so.

There's sometimes a temptation to just throw up my hands and quit.

But I won't. Not until I have to. Here's one of the searing images from the life of my mother, also a compulsive reader. Near the end of her life (she died at 98), she could no longer do so many of the things she'd loved to do throughout her life. Reading was one of the last. But until she had to move into a nursing facility from her assisted living unit, she kept on her table by her easy chair the last book she'd been reading. Unfinished. She couldn't read any longer, but she wanted that book where she could see it.

That's the way I want to go--if I have to live that long (which I probably will not): an unfinished book lying on the table beside me.

Let me end with something I read the other night in one of Wilkie Collins' final novels--Heart and Science (1883). Two doctors are talking, and one of them says: "'Give ignorance time ... and ignorance will become knowledge--if a man is in earnest'" (100).

Ignorance can become knowledge, but, as the doctor says, we must be "in earnest" if we want that transformation to be occur.

And I wonder, today, when so many people are perfectly happy with what they already know--and want no new information or fact to disturb their intellectual/emotional equilibrium--if the whole concept of being in earnest about replacing ignorance with knowledge is evanescing, right in front of our eyes.