What Henry Knew 
Michael Wood
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’
‘Like what we imagine knowledge to be’. There are many ways of imagining knowledge – this is a proposition not likely to provoke much dispute. But how about this one? There are many ways in which the imagination creates and imparts knowledge. Is this claim self-evident, or just untrue – untrue because the imagination, whatever its wonders and virtues, doesn’t deal in knowledge in any but the weakest, least demanding sense? There are all kinds of good things which are not knowledge, and we should not betray them by giving them the wrong name.
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Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge.
Other articles by this contributor:
Scentless Murder · Billy Wilder
At the Movies · L’Enfant
At the Movies · ‘No Country for Old Men’
At the Movies · Michael Wood sees Spider-Man 3
At the Movies · Bertolucci’s The Conformist
At the Movies · Michael Wood goes to see The Da Vinci Code
At the Movies · The Lives of Others
Just one of those ends · Apocalypse Regained
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