One kind of joy is the arrival or emergence of a new, hopeful life force. Romance, say. A story on page one. In a book I read again recently*: ‘what’s the point in being young if you’re not loved?’
It was half two, Friday night-Saturday morning, just past the time when a departure – coat, shoes, gloves, gathered in a sequence of moves, just a little too hesitantly from their places of earlier, casual abandonment – would have otherwise signalled to him (an introverted novitiate of romance, or so he wished to acknowledge) either a reluctance to move too fast or – No, no don’t. – a midnight flood approaching its ebb, a sotto voce change of heart. She was an unknown. His guesses at what he hoped she might be were rapid and exhilarating, like fireworks in a cloudless night sky — dizzying psychedelic visions — so much so that he could not resist wondering if the trajectory of this night might redirect the course of his entire life. She took a sip from a wine glass on the nearby kitchen table. The song playing in the background reached a noisy, guitar crescendo. She knelt down alongside him then shifted herself across his recumbent, cruciform body, tentative but deliberate, as he lay staring at the living room ceiling. Now he found himself gazing directly into her eyes, her dark hair curtaining the two of them so completely that it felt to him as if the rest of the world no longer mattered. Not. At. All. He smelled the cigarette smoke and remnant perfume in her hair. Oh yes, this was a beginning alright. Terrifying. But electric.
Another kind of joy is liberation from the heaviness of the life you had, or that surrounds you — a kind of spiritual levitation (or separation)— either for a moment, in your imagination, or for good, or forever.
Pan Am Flight 102 from Heathrow to New York was making its southward turn across Greenland toward the Saint Lawrence, then on past New England toward JFK. Below him, inching away as he stared down through the porthole, was an expanse of ice that would be featureless, seemingly without end, were it not for the scattered dots of sharp, diamond-blue pools that his gaze scanned for intently, keening for a way to relate this empty, devastatingly beautiful canvas seen from thirty-seven thousand feet with the cluttered grey city world he had left behind only a few hours before, but that now seemed gone and far away in a past life. This was limbo, still – an eight-hour interlude of nothingness, nowhereness in which he was suspended. The skin of the aircraft was his skin. The body of the plane was his spiritual body – floating far above the worlds both that he had left and towards which he was moving. Despite the adventure that he knew lay ahead there was still something, he felt — long-forgotten, deeply-buried still but energised with rising, irrepressible … what to call it: joy, love? — that wanted this — THIS — to last forever.
* Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes