Wordsworth was surprised by it. For Anaïs Nin, it was ever out of reach. As she wrote in a 1939 diary entry:
Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window.
Many have shared in Nin’s sense of joy as an elusive force, and tried to distil its essence. At only 16, Thomas De Quincey wrote a list of his “Sources of Happiness”, ranging from “poetry” to “glory” (opium hadn’t yet made the cut). Nin’s contemporary, Marion Milner, set up a fascinating experiment, logging every time she experienced happiness over a seven-year period. Capturing the pleasures of zoo trips (“Joy of long red legs and yellow ones”) and days off (“to do things I choose just for the joy of doing”), Milner’s A Life of One’s Own worked, for her, as a kind of textual net, which “entangled” joy’s “shadowy form”.
Curating our favourite things, von Trapp-style, has its virtues, but joy’s greatest hits come when people ditch the listicles and break out of themselves. Scenes of reunion do this particularly powerfully, from Robert Browning’s “two hearts beating each to each” in Meeting at Night, to Austen’s (re)meet-cute in Persuasion, as Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth walk the streets of Bath, “smiles reined in and spirits dancing in private rapture”. Bliss, as Tolstoy’s newly engaged Levin shows in Anna Karenina, has the capacity to ripple outwards, transforming the everyday:
And what he saw then he never saw again. He was particularly moved by the sight of children going to school, blue-grey pigeons swooping down to the pavement from a roof, and rolls dusted with flour being put out by an unseen hand. These rolls, the pigeons, and the two boys were ethereal creatures. All of this happened at the same time: a boy ran towards a pigeon and glanced up at Levin with a smile; the pigeon beat its wings, and flew off, sparkling in the sun, amidst particles of snow shimmering in the air, while from a window came the smell of freshly baked bread, and rolls were put out… Levin started laughing and crying with happiness.
Happiness, for Tolstoy, does not, as the novelist Henry de Montherlant claimed, “write white”. But many positive emotions do shade into grey. Joy, after all, is so often mingled with grief or darkness. Such ambiguity seems central to the ending of Edith Nesbit’s classic, The Railway Children. As a long-lost father returns home, freed from wrongful imprisonment, the plot hurtles towards a joyous conclusion. But at the last minute, we cut to a long shot. The father goes into the house. The door is closed:
I think we will not open the door or follow him. I think that just now we are not wanted there. I think it will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away. At the end of the field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and the harebells and Gipsy roses and St John’s Wort, we may just take one last look, over our shoulders, at the white house where neither we nor anyone else is wanted now.
It is as if the feeling of familial joy is too sharply powerful, too precious to see or touch, registered instead through the delicate spikes of grass and the trembling harebells. There’s generosity here too. Nesbit’s narrative discretion makes space for a world beyond the fictional walls, a world where happy ever afters may be harder to find.
Joy, at this moment in time, may feel for many people like something that dwells in a house far away. And the festive season, too, can be a period when one can feel unwanted – or at least feel that a specific kind of joy is wanting. This is when the gift of crafted words, with what Stephen King described as their “portable magic”, may step in. Such is the spirit and calling of Kim Addonizio’s beautiful 21st-century sonnet, To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall:
If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
