On Joy

Solstice, light, fulmine

Late yesterday afternoon, I stood in my scruffy patch of London garden and watched the light drain from a grey sky. It’s been a long time since I’ve marked the winter solstice. But yesterday, harried by the day, and inspired by Katherine May’s beautiful newsletter The Clearing, I took a moment to watch until the sky was dark. Then I hurried inside to light a yellow candle, and arrange a plate of orange slices into a flaming sun.

Later, as I ate a bright, lemony chickpea stew, and feeling grateful, I thought of all the ways light connects with the world of human feeling.

Many languages and cultures use light to think with. In English, we speak of beaming with pleasure, radiating love, of good news brightening our days. Light – and its absence - is one of the ‘metaphors we live by.’ It’s one of the stories we tell to comprehend the strangeness and subtleties of our inner worlds.

The influence of light on feeling has long been known. The 12^th century architects of Chartres Cathedral, one of the Gothic masterpieces of Europe, designed a world in which light streamed through stained glass windows and rebounded from the metal plate behind candles, and ricocheted around the gold, silver and copper objects on every surface, to create a feeling of God’s presence. Early twentieth-century novelists connected the advent of electric street lights – with their glare and flicker and shadows – to a new, emotionally charged urban landscape filled with possibility and threat. And here, in the 21^st century, my fingers hover over a link for light boxes which promise to cure my midwinter blues.

Though we try to harness light to curate our emotions, I am more interested in the way it surprises us. This week I learnt the Italian word fulmine, a flash of lightening. When I witnessed the light fade last night, I thought about the rhythms that hold us. But the sky itself was far from predictable or inevitable. Light played across it, spreading, glancing, vanishing. A hazy sky. A flare. The clouds moved again, and the rays were gone. A ghost of a silver lining.

Which brings me to joy.

Morgensol (Morning Light) by Peter Ilsted (1913) - National Gallery of Denmark.

When I was writing The Book of Human Emotions, I learnt that the word joy comes from the old French word, joie, jewel. I imagined a precious stone, sparkling in the sunlight, dazzling its wearer. I imagined light-sparks flying as a jeweller cuts and polishes.

This flickering quality of light captures something profoundly important about joy. The 17^th century philosopher Spinoza, who made his living as a lens-grinder, said we feel joy when something happens that is greater, better, more pleasurable than we dared imagine. When something exists ‘beyond our hope.’ In the history of European thought, joy has always been connected to the sudden and accidental, and to the light that makes these qualities clearest.

We live in a world where we have learnt to think our emotions can be brought to heel. Indeed, that they must be mastered. (And no more so at this time of year, when my social media feed starts to fill up with advice for managing fraying tempers in overheated living rooms, and the inevitable frustrations of the Big Day).

Ephemeral, unpredictable, light reminds how emotions can surprise us. Sometimes they feel like fulmine, breaking apart the sky in an instant before vanishing, leaving only an aura behind. In his Passions of the Soul (1649) Descartes described joy as a ‘sudden surprise of the soul’, using the old martial meaning of the word ‘surprise’ to evoke a stealth attack, a seizure. More than three hundred years later, in 2001’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions Martha Nussbaum also described joy as a kind of puncture. In her metaphor, the body is also jostled by joy – not like a surprised army, but more like an infant, wriggling in her crib, assailed by ‘sudden penetrations of light and joy.’

Watching the sun disappear last night, I thought about brief these sudden moments of joy are. We can’t predict them, though perhaps we can cultivate the ground that makes them possible. We can at least be ready and waiting, when the clouds part, and the light shines through. We can at least notice them in the unsung places.

This is what the novelist Katherine Mansfield understood.

In her short story Bliss, published in 1918, Mansfield described joy as feeling ‘as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of late afternoon sun…sending out a little shower of sparks’. Joy is precious because it is always about to disappear – the late afternoon sun; the incandescent particles that burn through the air and then are gone.

But for Mansfield, joy was not always fireworks. More often, it was subtle. Tiny. More precious because it arrived amid the mundane everyday. ‘The amount of minute and delicate joy I get out of watching people and things…is simply enormous’ she wrote. She found joy, she said, in her ordinary days by attuning herself to ‘the detail of life, the life of life’, as she put it.

During this holiday season, whatever you will be doing, I hope some joy, minute and delicate, is yours. I hope the life of life reveals itself to you. However briefly.