Birthdays and Joy
Today is my wonderful father’s birthday; it is also Paul’s; it is also the anniversary of Kristallnacht and of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Does anyone know how precisely –if at all- the Earth is in the same position relative to the sun in successive years on a given date?
My father has given me a great deal, and I’ve taken even more from him, particularly materially. One of my favorite gifts from him was C.S. Lewis’ marvelous autobiography of youth, Surprised by Joy, which explores a sensation the pursuit of which was to guide Lewis’ life.
By Joy, Lewis means a precise phenomenon which is by its nature indescribable directly; I often think of it as a kind of profoundly asymptotic experience, profound because all reality, all contact, all intellection is in some senses asymptotic; the asymptote is a metaphor I think of often. Lewis says Joy is “an unsatisfied desire which itself is more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He continues:
“Joy…is here a technical term and must be distinguished from both happiness and pleasure. Joy has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that…it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever…exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”
Joy is, for Lewis, most often brought about in contemplation of certain worlds, particularly in childhood, and I think it is most universally understood in that way: think of those worlds, those spaces you adored or considered magical in your youth. Perhaps it was a shed in which you played with a friend in which the sun though a small window illuminated the suspension of dust and made it appear that there was a wall of light. Perhaps it was the universe of a favorite children’s book, the illustrated rooms of which seemed rich in depth, every detail en enormity.
Perhaps it was even more vague; Lewis recalls the stirring of Joy when reading a poem:“I desired, with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote,” and later relates the development of his interest in Norse mythology to this resonance.
The frequency with which I’ve felt Joy has varied greatly; I anxiously worry that my medicines stifle it, but I have come to feel that it is actually ineluctable if one has any life of imagination at all. I feel that it is, in fact, a kind of barometer of my internal world. But it is rare, rarer than anything else I experience.
Lewis writes that “All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” In his life, the catalyst for Joy changed greatly over time and eventually became religious; indeed, there is much in the perpetually anticipatory, asymptotic, ungraspable, unspeakable quality of Joy that reminds one of various mysticisms, particularly of the East. But it is universal, I think; it is what sets us wandering in childhood, searching for beauty less of a formal than an emotional sort.
I’d never known that anyone else felt it before I read Surprised by Joy, and I can thank my dad for bringing awareness of it to me; he has done so with so many things I treasure over the course of my life that I could never repay him. Neither could I repay him all the money I’ve taken, but I think the former debt is the more significant.
