How Burgundy explains life
Complex and unreliable, the wine region resembles the experience of living
I LIVE near the old home of – now a museum devoted to – John Keats. His poems are too soulful and nature-smitten for as arid a man as me. But one phrase he invented is ever useful: “negative capability”. It appears in his letters, not his verse, and means a tolerance for “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts”.
If you are “content with half-knowledge”, instead of seeking clarity and order all the time, you possess negative capability. He used the term in praise of Shakespeare, who never tells us how to live and whose characters remain enigmas.
The wine of Burgundy is testing my negative capability. It rivals travel as my biggest financial outgoing after housing.
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