‘Spirits dancing in private rapture’: the best descriptions of joy in literature
Wordsworth was surprised by it. For Anaïs Nin, it was ever out of reach. As she wrote in a 1939 diary entry:
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:
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 longlost 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:
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: