There were a number of phrases that were part of my childhood. One of them was ” Ignorance is bliss”. Though I learnt it by heart when I was a kid, it was in my later years of life I could understand what it actually meant. For I was too naive to understand what bliss was. May be I was too blissful to understand follies of life.
Many years later when I was doing my honours in English literature I came to know that it was part of a poem written by Thomas Gray, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton Collage”. The entire phrase goes like this, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”
Years to come did not make me wise but did make me understand the actual meaning of “Ignorance is bliss”. While there are various means in this world by which you can gain wisdom, there is no path which can lead you back to ignorance from wisdom. For what you have found, sought, explored and gained (not material things) stays with you and it’s not easy to unlearn them. I realised how easy it was to learn things when I tried to unlearn a few.
Alas! A Man is no machine. Only if our minds were like a computer hard drive, we would have been able to delete whatever was on it and rewrite new things.
