Via Arts & Letters Daily and NY Review of Books:
It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.
Points:
- “Where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort.”
- “…we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available.”
- “…there is something in that old chestnut: ‘shared interests.’”
- “…there are all the many things that the dog does and says, entirely anthropomorphized and usually offensive, which express the universe of things we ourselves cannot do or say, to each other or to other people.”
- “Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily.”
- “…sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously.”
