“Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors …”

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

For Oscar Wilde, a cynic was someone who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Many of us are cynical now. Perhaps, to paraphrase Wilde, we value nothing because we insist on knowing the price of everything.

It’s 70 years since the first edition of the work of a different playwright, Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. As spring takes hold, here as it does in the Welsh village of Llareggub, we have yet another opportunity to re-see the greenness in the grass (“happy as the grass was green”, Fern Hill); and all the colour in the seemingly most drab and prosaic of surroundings.

In Thomas’s paradoxical world, the blind are generally best able to see, like Captain Cat or the grave men near death. There’s a profound point here, largely missed by a zeitgeist that equates knowledge with wisdom. It’s about seeing deeply instead of seeing a lot.

The biggest scientific breakthroughs haven’t required zillions of data points. They’ve been made by individuals who see what everyone else also sees, but more sensitively. Like Newton and his insight that white light comprises all the colours of the rainbow. Einstein didn’t have a much-vaunted-in-the-world-today thirst for knowledge. Of course, he needed some knowledge but that wasn’t really his goal. He had a thirst to understand the things – rendered deceptively banal by repeated experience – already known to him and numerous others, like the feeling of weightlessness when you descend in a lift, or the jiggling of small particles in a liquid. Which doesn’t mean that great insights necessarily follow from sitting in a chair; but scouring the planet for information doesn’t guarantee much insight, or any at all – and even has the potential to be counter-productive.

We don’t need big data. We need to understand our small data better. Like Dickens’ M’Choakumchild, who could have taught infinitely better so much more if only he’d learned a little less, we lose vitality when we take in too much. We don’t need to travel to numerous countries, or be able to list their capital cities or political leaders, in order to understand human affairs; we need to observe ourselves and people around us more thoughtfully. We don’t need lots of stuff, money or experiences; on the contrary, we need to escape from the poverty of our riches.

Acquiring knowledge for the sake of it might be exhilarating of course, which can be justification in its own right. But the wise amongst us are those who can gauge their personal limits, when too much interferes with either their happiness or their ability to think.

Learning when to stop is as under-appreciated today as it was in the world of Hard Times. Maybe we were wiser in some intervening period: certainly ‘moderation in all things’, a mantra of a previous generation, feels today like a forgotten lesson. Yet it’s more important than ever for a burning planet. Who needs to fly thousands of miles to enjoy a holiday who can properly appreciate a different part of Britain, the wood down the road, even a garden? Who needs a new dress or suit when the current one still looks good subject to a suitably carefree attitude to that small mark or hole? Who has to have a thousand friends who can be a good friend to a few?

If only we could fully observe the colour in nature, in people, ourselves, things; and also the energy we consume … when we fill the kettle, or put our finger on the thermostat, our foot on the accelerator pedal, our credit card details into Amazon. If only … then we wouldn’t need to place our blind-as-Captain-Cat faith in technology, we could salvage the planet with a gentler way of living.

We need to value what we already have.