The deepest human emotions may escape description. Here’s what we can learn from those who have tried to capture them.
Think about a time you felt joy in your life—true, real, deep joy. What was the event? The setting? What did that moment mean to you within the context of your life? Was it a culmination of years of struggle? The result of a religious experience? A chance occurrence that redefined how you saw the world? How did it change you?
Now, how would you describe it?
Sometimes, when it comes to experiences of intense, deep emotion, language fails us. Great writers have had difficulty capturing the feeling of joy in particular over the years. Rachel Arteaga, associate director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, has spent her career examining how Christian writers have sought to capture the feeling of joy in their writing. In her September 12, 2024, presentation at the Humanities Center Colloquium, titled “Feelings of Faith in American Literature,” Arteaga discussed how literature can provide insights into joy so we can better cultivate it in our lives.
Thoughtful Expression
Arteaga began by discussing joy itself, reading a few passages from writers Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin. She said, “According to these texts, joy resides too deeply within us to be fully understood in its strongest forms. It cannot be articulated in words. It is also troublingly close to sorrow, to grief and loss.” She explained that joy, while definitively a positive emotion, exists in close contrast with other strong, difficult emotions. We must understand that these all play off each other, as having one intensifies the others.
Joy resides too deeply within us to be fully understood in its strongest forms. It cannot be articulated in words.
To give some context to her discussion, Arteaga examined how people talk about emotion within the traditions of Christian belief and practice. She pointed out that emotion within Christian traditions is deeply integrated with thought and our bodies, rather than seen as completely separate and distinct. She said, “Feeling, and the wide range of terms it evokes, are deeply implicated in thought.”
Contrast in Deep Feelings
So, how does literature factor in to this discussion? Arteaga continued with examples from Tracy K. Smith, a poet whose writing can be understood if read through the lens of integrated thought and emotion. In Ordinary Light: A Memoir, Smith describes how her grief at her father’s death intensified her joy ten years later watching her son study in the same way his grandfather once did. Arteaga said, “These feelings seem to be interlocking, testifying together to her deepest beliefs and most cherished relationships.”
Arteaga pointed out how Smith learned to find joy despite her grief and explained that just as Smith found it, we can do the same. “I would suggest that poetry opens up for us a roof,” she said in closing. “If we can bring ourselves to walk under it, in the company of the people we have known. . . perhaps in that room, by the fire, we too will find ourselves in the presence of joy.”
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