Langston Hughes: Looking for Joy

Joy

I went to look for Joy,
Slim, dancing Joy,
Gay, laughing Joy,
Bright-eyed Joy--
And I found her
Driving the butcher's cart
In the arms of the butcher boy!
Such company, such company,
As keeps this young nymph, Joy!
--Langston Hughes--

I think the charm is its ambiguity.  Is Joy a young girl or is it the emotion itself?  Or is it both?  Whichever it is, Joy can be found anywhere, even in the arms of the butcher boy.    I can picture the cart moving through the streets guided by the butcher boy with his love in his arms, and their hands intertwined while holding the reins.  I can also picture that same cart driven by a young boy, grinning cheerfully, smiling at all who meet his eye, just glad to be alive.

Joseph Wood Krutch, more thougts on Joy

J0seph Wood Krutch in his Baja California and the Geography of Hope expresses some unusual ideas, (well, they are unusual today) on joy and its presence in nature. Obviously this is not a scientific view of nature, for when was the last time anyone heard a scientist say anything about joy in nature--that would be unscientific. But, fortunately, Krutch is not a scientist and therefore he can see this in nature--in plants and animals.

Joy is the one thing of which indisputably the healthy animal, and even the healthy plant, gives us an example. And we need them to remind us that beauty and joy can come of their own accord when we let them. The geranium on the tenement window and the orchid in the florist's shop, the poodle on the leash and the goldfish in the bowl, are better than nothing. In the consciousness of the city-dweller, they ought to play a part no less essential than that of the sleek chrome chair and the reproductions of Braque and Miro.

Here [in Baja California] I have, literally, God's plenty. Everything reminds me that man is an incident in nature rather than, as one comes to suppose in the city, that the natural is, at most, an incident, surviving precariously in a man-made world. If I do on my own a little of that peeping and botanizing which Wordsworth scorned, I think that I profit less from what I learn about nature than I do from what I should prefer to call the example she sets me--the example, I mean, of confidence, of serenity, and, above all, of joy. In the city, perhaps especially in the city of today, one may pass whole weeks without meeting a single joyous person or seeing a single joyous thing. One may meet laughter there, and wit--sometimes, perhaps, a fragment of wisdom. These are all good things which I would not willingly do without. But joyousness, as distinguished from diversion and amusement and recreation, is so rare that a whole philosophy has been developed to make a virtue out of its absence.

This world, we are told, is a terrible place, and it is wicked not to be almost continuously aware of the fact. Diversion in limited quantities is permissible as a temporary relaxation, but moral indignation should be the staple of any human life, properly spent. Yet it seems to me that Joy and Love, increasingly fading from human experience, are the two most important things in the world, and that if one must be indignant about something, the fact that they are so rare is the thing most worth of indignation.

-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope

I wonder what would happen if one of the candidates in the primaries being held this Spring of 2012 should begin to criticize The System today because of its limited, materialistic view, that there is something more important than economics and religious prohibitions and struggles for world domination. Just suppose that that candidate began to argue that our outlook on life (and not merely just a particular religious doctrine) and that our relationship to the world we live in is just as important, if not more so, than economics and social controls and world preeminence.

I think that person would labelled a nut. What could be more important than jobs and proper religious behavior and world domination?

Joseph Wood Krutch: November 25, 1893 to May 22, 1970

Beauty and joy are natural things. They are older than man, and they have their source in the natural part of him. Art becomes sterile and the joy of life withers when they become unnatural. If modern urban life is becoming more comfortable, more orderly, more sanitary, and more socially conscious than it ever was before--but if at the same time it also becoming less beautiful (as it seems to me) and less joyous (as it seems to nearly everyone) -- then the deepest reason for that may be its increasing forgetfulness of nature. She is often none of the good things which the city is, but she is almost always, nevertheless, somehow beautiful and somehow joyous.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch--
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope


Krutch seems to feel we are giving up something precious for a life that may be

more comfortable, more orderly, more sanitary, and more socially conscious than it ever was before.

Is this a fair trade or is it even true? Are people as joyous as they have been in the past?




I think perhaps William Wordsworth is saying something very similar here.

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The wind that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

-- William Wordsworth