We treat knowledge as power by default, but knowing more can just as easily weigh you down. Innocent has wished, more than once, that he didn’t know something — a rosy picture replaced by an ugly reality, with no way to un-see it. “It is hard to lie to yourself.”

So knowledge isn’t power on its own. The same fact can lift you or sink you; what decides is what you do with it. Knowing you’re alive doesn’t automatically make you love life. Knowing you’ll die one day needn’t make you lose hope in it.

That’s the whole hinge: “Knowledge is power only when we choose to use it to our advantage.” The power was never in the knowing — it’s in the using.