Joy

We seek pleasure in food and drink to nourish the body, and in conviviality and escapism, music and nostalgia1 that might unburden the soul. We search for happiness in life, even though its particular product, the contentment in meeting a need, lasts for a finite time2.

Joy waits for us to receive it inwardly, before it deepens into meaning3. As for joy, so also for love and grief, all of which exist independently of time and outward expression. From perceptions of joy come delight and wonder4, which may surface in the calm and tender environment of a tolerant and equitable community5.

The 19ᵗʰ century American poet Emily Dickinson wrote to her beloved elder brother Austin about an abiding joy that awaits him beyond darker places6:

There is another sky
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Tho’ it be darkness there—
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green,
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been,
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum,
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

• Fandom began with the mass production of gramophone records in the 1890s, popularising individual artists. From the 1990s, Internet streaming enabled bespoke personalisation of entertainment for repeatable pleasure, nostalgia and solace.
• The 1500 BCE Harvester Vase from Agia Triada in Crete depicts the infectious merriment of ordinary Minoans celebrating the completion of a grain harvest, which will meet their food needs for the coming winter.
  The Chinese philosopher Confucius (551-479 BCE) saw virtue in sufficiency of need:
  The Master said: “With coarse food to eat, water for drink, and a bent arm for a pillow, - even in such a state I could be happy, for wealth and honour obtained unworthily are to me as a fleeting cloud.”
  (Analects VII-XV, translated from Classical Chinese by W.E. Soothill).
• For Rainer Maria Rilke, joy resolves itself only to the person who has interiorised it:
  But we so lightly forget what our laughing neighbour
  neither confirms nor envies. We want to be visibly
  able to show it, whereas the most visible joy
  can only reveal itself to us when we’ve transformed it, within.
  (Duino Elegies 1912 The Seventh Elegy, translated from German by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender).
• Confucius gave the highest value to delighting in the truth, which requires only a quiet mind (Analects VI-XVIII):
  The Master said: “He who knows the Truth is not equal to him who loves it, and he who loves it is not equal to him who delights in it.”
• Confucius enjoyed the company of his disciple Yen Hui above all others, not for the questioning nature of an apprentice, but for his receptive spirit (Analects XI-III):
  “Hui gives me no assistance. There is nothing that I say in which he does not take delight.”
  The ancient Greek poet Sappho, from c. 600 BCE, expressed maternal feelings for the young women in her circle, revealing her delight in their company:
  Towards you, lovely ones, my thoughts
  never change
  (Sappho fragment, translated by S. Lombardo from the ancient Greek of Apollonius Dyscolus’ c. CE 130 On Pronouns, where Apollonius first preserved it as an example of Aeolic dialect: ταῖς κάλαις ὔμμιν τὸ νόημα τὦμον / οὐ διάμειπτον).
• On October 17ᵗʰ 1851, when 20-year old Emily Dickinson composed ‘There is another sky’ in a letter to her 22-year old brother Austin, he was living in the North End neighbourhood of Boston, feeling alienated by city life and unhappy in his work as a school teacher. Their frequent correspondence spoke of his ill health and homesickness for the pastoral haven of Amherst, where Emily lived in the family mansion. Her poem remained unpublished in her lifetime, as did these rhythmic lines written a decade later on the joy of spiritual freedom, and hand-sewn into one of her manuscript ‘fascicles’:
  No prisoner be—
  Where Liberty—
  Himself—abide with Thee—

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index