Eden, omniscience, & John Keats’ mansion of life
John Keats (1795 – 1821) was an English Romantic poet who thought a lot about knowledge and uncertainty. In May 1818, Keats wrote a letter to his friend J. H. Reynolds in which he compared life to a “mansion of many apartments.”
It’s an unusual analogy where each room in the mansion corresponds to a different degree of understanding of the world. And you can’t enter a new room until you’ve mastered the one that you’re in.
Keats’ analogy is significant because it shows us the path to understanding life.
The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats (c. 1899) from The Library of Congress
The two chambers of life
Keats only describes two rooms in the mansion and notes that he’s trapped in the second one. The first room is called the “infant or thoughtless Chamber” and it’s where our thoughts aren’t fully developed. Keats describes it simply: “The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think.”
The second room is more interesting. Keats calls it the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought” and describes it as a pure, Eden-like paradise: “We become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight.”
But something darker lurks within this room, and its inhabitants begin to see traces that it isn’t so idyllic. Keats begins to see pain, sickness, and the darker elements of human nature. He experiences “That tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of man – of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness, and oppression.”
The darkness gradually fills the chamber until Keats is surrounded by it, and the doors that the chamber leads to are all darkened too:
“This Chamber of Maiden Thought become gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark passages – We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist -- We are now in that state – We feel the ‘burden of the Mystery.’”
The second chamber: a paradise lost
The second room, The Chamber of Maiden-Thought, gives us important insights because of its biblical parallels. We know Keats was likely thinking about biblical stories because, in this same letter, he references John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost — the quintessential fictional work on man’s Fall from grace. And when we read Keats’ descriptions of the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, it’s heavily reminiscent of the story of Adam and Eve.
The story of Adam and Eve is one of knowledge and disobedience. To attain knowledge, Adam and Eve disobey God’s orders. They live in peace and bliss until a serpent (Satan) tempts Eve to eat from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God forbade. In the story, knowledge is quite literally a forbidden fruit.
After Adam and Eve eat from this tree, they become aware of their vulnerability, mortality, and the consequences of their actions. God also punishes them and humanity for eternity. Thus, eating from this tree is an act of defiance and signals a loss of innocence. Knowledge is paired as the antithesis of innocence.
Bringing this back to Keats’ mansion, Keats can’t distinguish between good and evil in the second chamber. He writes, “We see not the ballance of good and evil.” He has the same level of knowledge and experience as a pre-Fall Adam and Eve.
In order to advance to the other rooms, it seems he needs to learn this distinction. But to parallel the story of Adam and Eve, gaining this knowledge requires a loss of innocence or an act of disobedience. But how?
The antidote to uncertainty: negating the ego and… time
When we tie in Keats’ idea of negative capability, we can make more sense of his chambers. Negative capability is the idea that we can’t understand certain aspects of the world because we’re limited to our singular experience and perspective.
But the key to negative capability, and the reason it’s called ‘negative’ capability, is that it requires negating the self or the ego. When we negate our egos, we begin to understand a multitude of perspectives.
Mary Oliver describes this idea well (when applied to poetry):
“The poet should be a kind of negative force—that only by remaining himself negative, or in some way empty, is the poet able to fill himself with an understanding of, or sympathy for, or empathy with, the subject of his poem.”
To move further within Keats’ mansion seems to require an act of defiance or a negation of some sort. And not just a negation of ego but, bear with me, a negation of time.
This is going to get abstract, but drawing from the book Siddhartha, when the planes of time are equal (when the past is the present is the future), we are all the same.
“In the deepest meditation we have the possibility of negating time, of seeing all life, all having been, being, and becoming, as simultaneous, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman.” – from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
For example, imagine a bird dies. Over time, the bird’s body decomposes into dust, and in thousands of years that dust forms into a rock. Thus, when the planes of time are removed, a bird is a rock! In this way, we are all interconnected. Negating time breeds a greater understanding of the world because we experience different ways of life.
A house of infinite doors and its final room
While Keats doesn’t know what’s in the rest of the mansion—he says, “I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.”— I think we can hazard a guess.
I imagine there are infinite doors in this mansion. There are infinite experiences in life across millions and millions of animate and inanimate lifeforms. Going back to Siddhartha, to attain Nirvana or ultimate wisdom and peace, the protagonist intensely observes the world and meditates to essentially live the life of everything on earth—from people and birds to trees and rocks.
He comes to understand that all life and all elements on earth are interconnected; when time is removed, we are all the same thing:
"They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.” – from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
I think this is what the final room in the mansion would hold. Omniscience or Nirvana. And the result is total peace, acceptance, understanding, and compassion.
What do you think of Keats' chambers and analogy? What do you think the other chambers hold? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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