无知是福

［補八二則］

W.L. Schwartz¹, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature, pp.99-100, gives a synopsis of Georges Clemenceau’s one-act play Le Voile du Bonheur (1900). The blind mandarin-literatus Tchang-I loved his wife, his son, his friend Tou-Fou & his secretary Li-Kiang, & was happily secure in their requital of his affection. One day, a European healer gave him a phial of medicine that would restore his sight. The potion worked, & he discovered to his unspeakable sorrow the son mockingly mimicing him, the wife comitting adultery with the friend, & the  secretary setting up as the author of his poems — he caught all 4 with their pants down, so to speak. I have not read the play, but I can imagine Clemenceau at his most hilariously cynical. The situation is a stark one.

For example, Thomas Hood’s “Tim Turpin” has the same theme: “Tim Turpin he was gravel-blind, / And ne’er had seen the skies: / For Nature, when his head was made, / Forgot to dot his eyes. // ... // But when his eyes were opened thus [by a doctor], / He wished them dark again: / For when he looked upon his wife, / He saw her very plain” etc. (J.M. Cohen, More Comic & Curious Verse, p.149). Similarly, the blind beggar in Synge’s The Well of the Saints, as well as in Yeats’s The Cat & the Moon recovers his eyesight only wish to lose it again (cf. V. Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition, p.35). As Nietzsche says: “Wenn man dem Bucklichten seinen Buckel nimmt，so nimmt man ihm seinen Geist — also lehrt das Volk. Und wenn man dem Blinden seine Augen giebt, so sieht er zuviel schlimme Dinge auf Erden: also dass er Den verflucht，der ihn heilte” (Also sprach Zarathustra: “Von der Erlösung”, Werke, hrsg. K. Schlechta, II, 392). The moral of course is: “Where ignorance is bliss / ’Tis folly to be wise”【Thomas Gray: “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”: “No more; where ignorance is bliss, / ’Tis folly to be wise”】.

cf. Adam’s exclamation when his “eyes were opened” by Michael to the disastrous consequences of his disobedience: “O visions ill foreseen! Better had I / lived ignorant of future” etc. (Paradise Lost, XI, 763 ff., Milton, Poetical Works, “Everyman’s Lib.”, p.251); Rousseau: “L’ignorance est encore préférable. Que ne suis-je resté toujours dans cette imbécile mais douce confiance qui me rendit durant tant d’années la proie et le jouet de mes bruyants amis, sans qu’enveloppé de toutes leurs trames j’en eusse même le moindre soupçon!... Ces douces illusions sont détruites ... Ainsi toutes les expériences de mon âge sont pour moi dans mon état sans utilité présente，et sans profit pour l’avenir” (Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire, 3^e Promenade, Confessions et Rêveries, “Bib. de la Pléiade”, pp.666-7).

See 七○五則 on 《列子·周穆王篇》，Horace, Epist., II. ii, 128.²【Matthew Prior: “To the Honourable Charles Montague”: “If we see right we see our woes: / Then what avails it to have eyes? / From ignorance our comfort flows: / The only wretched are the wise” (Literary Works, ed. H.B. Wright & M.K. Spears, p.109); Swift, A Tale of a Tub, Sect. IX³: “This is the sublime & refined point of felicity, called the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state, of being a fool, among knaves” (Oxford, p.497).】【Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part II, Sect.III, Mem.VIII: “Some think fools & dizzards live the merriest lives, as Ajax [554] in Sophocles, Nihil scire vita jucundissima, ’tis the pleasantest life to know nothing [Seneca, Oedipus, 515]; iners malorum remedium ignorantia, ignorance is a down-right remedy of evils”⁴ (Bell, II, p.238).】