On Joy
“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… The thing that no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live? …
The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, ‘It hurts as much as it is worth.’ … What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy… The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.”
– Joy, by Zadie Smith
What is the distinction between pleasure and joy? Something that stands out to me now is the possibility that pleasures may age into joy. Memories of sitting with 爺爺 on his rocking chair, or watching teledramas with 阿媽, may have in the moment been indistinguishable from any other pleasure. Only in retrospect do I realize they have crystallized into some of the joys of my life.
Joy, it seems, is something much bigger—joys are those in life we live for. Kira became a joy of our family’s life, even if she wasn’t always a pleasure, and watching her suffer was painful. She was my mom’s mortal-enemy-turned-constant-companion. She was my dad’s eager audience for his penchant to spoil people with food. She accompanied Stephanie’s coming of age. During the first COVID lockdown year when Wanwan and I took care of Kira, some of the shining moments were being beckoned by Kira every day to open the backdoor so she could bask in the sunlight and sniff out what other animals had scuttled through our yard in the past day.
As Kira criss crossed across the yard every day, was she feeling pleasure or joy? Zadie Smith the cynic, with loss on her mind, wrote that “dogs and cats sensibly choose pleasure over joy,” as if pleasure is a purer, simpler experience more fitting of sane individuals. Smith herself wrote that she has only known joy 5 times in her life, perhaps six, … “and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else.” She isn’t sure how much more joy she could bear in her life.
I am not so sure about her premise. In the moments when I see Kira so completely in the moment, I let myself wonder: what if every pleasure Kira and other pets feel actually is joy? A thorough joy worth living for? Part of the joy of spoiling pets is this feeling in the back of my mind that what might be a mere pleasure (if at all) for me could be (or become) pure joy for them. In those moments of giving, I live for a gravity-less moment where joy might be possible without the fall.
But I understand Zadie Smith’s anxiety about joy. Joy so full and worthwhile that one is afraid of being left empty when the joy passes. Joy so thorough that one is not sure when they’ll experience it again.1 Perhaps this is lived the reality that most of us live in, that joy eventually hurts as much as it is worth. And in this odd way, I can’t bring myself to let go of the pain either, for it feels like that would extinguish the joy that has been. Like the sun, one can only take quick passing glances at joy, lest the pain of its radiance immolate us. But joy goes on basking us in warmth and powering everything we do.2
For some this may mean peace – no more reason to search. For others this can be haunting – nothing to look forward to anymore. Oh how the same situation can be experienced in such different ways!
Reminder to self: there are also a lot of interesting lines of thought on the relation of joy to Buddhism, and joy in general (the latter, covered by Matthew Kuhn, e.g. joy as intentional and motivating).