And then, still consulting the poets, we have “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” by Thomas Gray (1716–1771), which gives us the familiar and out-of-context-misleading line “ignorance is bliss.” He qualified it: the last stanza says
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.
(Full text here. The speaker is viewing his alma mater from a distance, thinking about boys at play on its grounds, and ponderiing how it would spoil their carefree joy if they could see their own futures.)
”Where ignorance is bliss.” In other words, when knowledge (such as knowledge of what life has in store for us—always, in the end, death by some means) would destroy happiness, then it is better to be without it. But that does not mean that all ignorance is the way to bliss or that bliss is possible only in the absence of understanding. It just means that if we are better off not knowing what’s going to happen to us, then it would be foolish to try to know. (And of course we can’t anyway, but we can make ourselves miserable by thinking about it.)