My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk
Source: Ode to a Nightingale (1820)
Topic
Sense in this collection covers both common sense and the sense that makes life meaningful — and the two are less connected than the word suggests. Shaw's mistake-versus-nothing is here: a life of errors makes more sense than a life of abstention because at least it is engaged. Jefferson on a room without books making life meaningless is the cultivated sense — the belief that meaning requires intellectual content. Bacon on humor as compensation for what we are not gives sense its consolatory function: the capacity to find things funny compensates for the gap between what we are and what we wish to be. Beecher on the wagon without springs is the social observation: the person who cannot find anything funny is jolted by everything that goes wrong and has no mechanism for absorption. Twain on copyright law and God is the comic application: some sense-making is beyond even divine capacity. What the collection argues is that sense — in both its meanings — is not given but made, through the decisions about what to attend to and what to let pass.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk