Ignorance is my bliss. I’m happiest, I think, not knowing what I think.

Something comes into view – a poem, say. Do I like it or not? Why? What about it attracts or repels?

One question leads to the next, deeper and deeper into the forest of not knowing. Retirement lavishes me with time and freedom to explore as never before. I can think what I like, not what I ought. If thinking tempts me in a dubious direction, so what, I don’t have to represent my organization or appease my boss. I can follow an inquiry wherever it might lead, even to the refutation of what I thought before. I write to track my thoughts – not to tell you what I know but to share the adventure of finding out.

Is this passion odd? No matter. I no longer have to explain myself; I’m just an old guy puttering in his garden, having fun. In my career years, I had to be responsible. The wider one’s authority, the narrower one’s restrictions. That’s why Thoreau decamped to his cabin by the pond. There he did not have to make a living, support a family, placate his neighbors. No keeping up with the Joneses when you’re all alone. Sure, it’s lonely, but you enjoy the company of your own thoughts, which you mightn’t otherwise. I wanted to be Thoreau. I also wanted to be a bigshot, rich and admired. Few, if any, can manage both. Incompatible objectives prodded me into a schizophrenic pattern. I was one person in public, another with my door shut. Neither self could endure the other; they kept bashing each other, tooth and nail.

My public self retired, leaving my private self to gabble and gambol as I pleased. I wasn’t as free as Thoreau, but I was my freest ever. Journals, missives, poems were my lab notes. Every view, even of the most familiar sights, differed from what I expected. I shared my findings with the eagerness of a kid plucking flowers from a field.

I’d always loved poems, so I knew what a poem was, right? Wrong. My idea of a poem was what I’d been taught, not what I thought. I preferred poems that were musical, memorable, comprehensible without a professor. The poetry I was taught was knotty, unhummable, and made my brain ache. My heart told me Oscar Hammerstein II was a great poet and Ezra Pound a great fraud, but if I’d argued such a thing in college I’d flunk, so no dice. Our brains, like our bodies, are self-protective, daring so far and no farther.

Now I can think, hmmm, maybe modernism with its convolutions were a blind alley. Maybe the greatest poets of their hour sensed this deep down. Maybe “popular” wasn’t always pejorative. So what if such views were anathema to academia? I was just a dotty old guy puttering, the way Thoreau was a misfit dropout.

Even sweeter, I didn’t have to earn promotion or win a debate. Though I love saying what I see, I loathe debating. No one wins a debate. Losers aren’t persuaded, they just lick their wounds. I say what I see and if you see differently, go for it. “Certainty is a redoubt from doubt,” I intoned, pleased with my wit.

I do not know what I think and never will. That is my bliss. What I think today may change tomorrow, should change, if I’m paying attention. As Oscar Hammerstein II put it (more eloquently than Ezra Pound):

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWho can explain it,Who can tell you why.Fools give you reasons,Wise men never try.