departments of knowledge

Every department of Knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this, that I am glad at not having given away my medical Books, which I shall again look over to keep alive the little I know thitherwards…. An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people — it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery: a thing I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your Letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this — in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all the horror of a bare shouldered creature — in the former case, our shoulders are fledge, and we go thro’ the same air and space without fear.

— Keats, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (3 May 1818), making a very similar case to the one I make in Breaking Bread with the Dead. Pynchon: “Personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth,” and in this case intellectual bandwidth — the breadth of understanding that comes from having some understanding of very different disciplines. Keats loved poetry as much as anyone ever has, maybe more than anyone ever has, but he didn’t want to forget his medical training. The more knowledge he has the less susceptible he is to the “heat and fever” of the moment.