Time & Perspective Quote by John Dryden

Dryden is selling ignorance as a kind of mercy, but he does it with the sly confidence of someone who’s watched curiosity turn into self-harm. The couplet’s music is the trick: “reveal” and “concealed” tug against each other, a neat paradox that frames not-knowing as an active discipline rather than passive dimness. Joy, in this logic, isn’t earned by mastering reality; it’s protected by leaving certain doors shut.

The subtext is almost managerial: don’t audit the future, because the ledger won’t make you richer. “A busy person” is the pointed jab. Dryden isn’t praising industriousness; he’s diagnosing a mind that can’t sit still, the type that digs for certainty and ends up excavating grief. The warning lands in the conditional mood (“would find”), suggesting the future is already stocked with pain; foreknowledge simply drags it forward into the present, forcing you to pay interest early.

Context matters here. Late 17th-century England is a nation reeling from plague, fire, regicide, restoration, and religious whiplash. Fate is not a cute abstraction; it’s politics, disease, and sudden reversals of fortune. Dryden, who navigated shifting regimes with his career intact until it wasn’t, understood that tomorrow’s truth can become today’s liability. The line reads like a stoic proverb filtered through a poet’s ear: don’t confuse prophecy with power. The real control you have is over your attention, and sometimes sanity depends on what you refuse to know.