Wine Dark
I love context. And I had a good example of it this morning. I was feeling overwhelmed by the world and wished I could enjoy the bliss of ignorance. Then I wondered about the genesis of the words and looked it up. There was Thomas Gray’s poem, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and right at the end I read this: “…where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.” It’s a poem on the innocence of youth, and they’re ignorant of what’s to come. I don’t believe Gray intended them as words to live by.
On the subject of ignorance, however, I ran across an interesting tidbit the other day. Someone asked a national park employee why it was so hard to design a bear-proof container that was easy to use. The park employee explained that there was a serious overlap in the intelligence of bears and the stupidity of humans. That made me laugh because I’ve had to pause a time or two myself when it came to throwing away trash in a park. Now I know there are bears smarter than me, at least when it comes to accessing trash cans.
Now that I write that, it occurs to me I have no idea if that story is true or not. But it’s funny, so I think I’ll run with it because it’s not malicious. And that’s how things get into the canon and get repeated and become apocryphal tales. It feels good to be part of a tradition like that, the storytelling tradition. Not Homer, but who is? So, if you like the wine dark sea you have to look the Greeks, not me. And that’s all I have to say today.