zadie smith on joy
January 29, 2013
Cheryl Strayed posted a link to this article on FB and I am reposting it because it is an amazing.
Here are some excerpts from Zadie Smith’s insights on joy:
…that strange mixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy . . Until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my 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.
It doesn’t fit with the everyday. The thing 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?
Joy is such a human madness.
That’s crazy! I thought of you when I read this! It’s in the New York Review of Books and is totally completely brilliant–wait–I think I did text you about that didn’t I??
This was from the NYB. I thought you texted me about the article in the New Yorker, which was vaguely about Joni Mitchell.
oh, I think I conflated the two.
I read the New Yorker one and could not figure out exactly why you related to it, but this NYB one makes total sense.