Wisdom comes, but through pain. And sometimes the pain is enough that we may wish with all our being to be less wise than we are about to become.

But I remember a guy I used to know describing once when his son, then a toddler, got deathly ill. They called the ambulance and he carried the kid outside to wait – he walked all the way to the corner, I guess thinking that a few feet closer to the paramedics could be the difference. He told me that as he stood there, holding his son and waiting for the ambulance, he literally didn’t know if the boy was dead or alive.

I’ll never forget that story as long as I live, nor will I forget the look on his face as he told it. But I recognize the same profundity in Jonson’s words.

Thanks for a great essay.

Thank you for this. Ben Johnson had the misfortune to be a very, very good playwright and poet in the Age of Shakespeare and, to a lesser degree, Marlowe. As a playwright, the poor man was hidebound by the four unities and his somewhat minor education in Latin playwrights such as (shudder) Seneca. All too often, we remember him only as Shakespeare’s inferior, a man who wrote for the King’s Men on occasion when there was no new Shakespeare play at hand.

And let’s not forget that he was among the foremost classical scholars of his day, despite having limited educational opportunities. He must have been brilliant.

When I teach them now, it’s with awe at the man who could hold himself together and write such magnificent verse with his heart broken so badly. As well as all that stuff mentioned above.

Wisdom is potent stuff, isn’t it?

I do appreciate, however, that you put it back again.