Mark Twain was a very different author from Keats. He did learn to understand the Mississippi very deeply, from the perspective of a riverboat captain and of an author on the topic. In his book “Life on the Mississippi” he claims that while knowing the river as he did has its own pleasures, some of the more generally accessible pleasures of gazing at the river as a naive person were lost in becoming an expert. I don’t know if they were still available from other rivers. If you watch a toddler it’s also clear that we no longer experience the pleasures of walking or grasping as non-experts, nor do we remember them to compare them to those of adult concentration on physical activity. More trivially, one only gets to hear a joke or read a book for the first time once. None of this goes very far towards justifying Keats’s suggestion that we never hear the joke, as it were, but it does give us some reason, possibly mitigated by the prospect of transhuman recall but probably not eliminated, for some qualms at the prospect of immortality as a superior alternative to cycling the population, and of course a lesser reason for ambivalence about our departure from Malthusian rates of reproduction.
Mark Twain was a very different author from Keats. He did learn to understand the Mississippi very deeply, from the perspective of a riverboat captain and of an author on the topic. In his book “Life on the Mississippi” he claims that while knowing the river as he did has its own pleasures, some of the more generally accessible pleasures of gazing at the river as a naive person were lost in becoming an expert. I don’t know if they were still available from other rivers. If you watch a toddler it’s also clear that we no longer experience the pleasures of walking or grasping as non-experts, nor do we remember them to compare them to those of adult concentration on physical activity. More trivially, one only gets to hear a joke or read a book for the first time once. None of this goes very far towards justifying Keats’s suggestion that we never hear the joke, as it were, but it does give us some reason, possibly mitigated by the prospect of transhuman recall but probably not eliminated, for some qualms at the prospect of immortality as a superior alternative to cycling the population, and of course a lesser reason for ambivalence about our departure from Malthusian rates of reproduction.