Joy Zadie Smith Analysis

According to Google, the word pleasure is defined as “a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment,” while the word joy is defined as “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.” However, a dictionary definition is not merely as complex, subjective, and versatile as human emotions and experiences – though, it does provide a basic generalization of how most people perceive and process different feelings, emotions, and moods. Author, Zadie Smith, respectively, analyzes and differentiates between pleasure and joy and distinctively separates the two with regards to their quality and quantity. As she explains, pleasure most closely refers to a temporary state of satisfaction and contentment, it can be easily forgotten, and is often times preferred

over joy. Contrastingly, joy, as defined by Smith, is much more complex (in the sense that it is not merely one type of feeling, but rather a series of emotions mixed together like a cocktail) and by its nature, joy rarely contains any pleasure at all, though without it life would be meaningless; as human lives are an accumulation of choices and experiences defined by whatever emotion, sentiment, and consequence are attached to them.

To Zadie Smith, joy, unlike pleasure, is not a sub-category of happiness; but is rather something so delirious that thinking about it (or rather reminiscing about it) somehow dements and destroys the feeling entirely, allowing the feeling to be devoured by its potential negative consequences or side effects. Simply put, Smith believes that pleasure can be romanticized, while joy cannot; and although that may be the case on the surface, her acute intellectual analysis and assessment reveals that joy in its truest and purest form is what every human being should strive for in order to reach bliss or a perfect state of

happiness.
Accordingly, the problem with the dictionary definition of joy is that it does not take into account the negative weight of the word. While by the same token, the problem with Smith’s definition of joy is that she distorts the word’s meaning in such manner that the delightfulness and pleasurable aspects of it are pulled and twisted so out of shape that if joy was a ray of light broken up by a dispersive prism, its constituent spectral colors would be in different shades of gray and blue instead of a complete rainbow. Additionally, Smith makes joy to be a rare, short term experience when in reality millions of people experience genuine joy over long periods of time. Smith states that she has experienced joy six times in her life – five times in its genuine form, and once she falsely interpreted a drug-induced state of ecstasy, elation, thrill, and frenzy as joy. Her five encounters with joy in its true form can best be summarized as “swimming in a Welsh mountain lake with somebody dear to [her],” a train ride with her husband “to visit the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz,” sitting on a high wall with her “wild crush” after the museum they were visiting had closed without them noticing, “sitting on a high hill in the South of France, […being notified that her…] two years of tension, tedious study, and academic anxiety have not been in vain,” and giving birth to her daughter. Notably, all of Smith’s joyful experiences are limited to no more than twenty-four time frames – and I am certain that at least half of them were followed by jubilating, if not pleasurable consequences. So why does she limit her joyful experiences and continues to insist that there is no point in “thinking about joy” when joy is clearly a fundamental aspect of her life? Accordingly, why does she insist that joy is “dangerous” and even goes as far calling it “human madness?”
Perhaps the answer to those questions lie in three distinctive features: firstly, in Smith’s own unique interpretation of events and emotions; secondly, in her the fear that she could lose her source(s) of joy at any given moment as she knows and understands that life is short and our loved ones will eventually be lost to us; and thirdly, since she was able to recognize and identify joy after her drug experience, she has concluded that at the end of the day joy has no substantial meaning. But what makes joy so vividly important is what I believe to be Zadie Smith’s underlying message (besides framing her entire essay as a love letter to her husband): that it is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. Since to Smith, joy is as vulnerable as the person who brings it, she is resistant to reminisce and romanticize it; because, eventually, the more joy she finds in love, the greater the loss she will suffer when it is gone. And that is why joy “hurts just as much as it is worth.” However, by contrast, the end of a pleasure is always harmless, and easily replaceable. But people – and pets – and the joy they bring are irreplaceable. Consequently, for Smith, choosing joy over pleasure seems unreasonable and insane. But how can a choice that ultimately conforms to how any human being should live, be unreasonable? Conceivably, it seems that Smith is confusing what is commonly taken as rational with what she has learned is really rational. Considering one standard basis, an act is only rational to the extent that it helps bring about what you want to achieve; so it would make sense that the common mind would prefer pleasure to joy. But what Smith’s life has exposed to her is that most people are wrong about life's end goal and that it should be joy, not pleasure. Therefore, acting for pleasure is not rational. It is also wrong on Smith’s behalf, to view humans as the only, or rather ultimate source of joy; because in many people’s theoretical and spiritual view, human joys and loves needs to be grounded in and directed toward the eternal reality of a God who is identical with love.
It is self-evident to anyone who lives in this day and age that pleasures are rather easy to come by, but joy is more elusive and obscure.

As Smith explains, I find joy to be some kind of unhappiness and grief, a distinguishable feeling of bittersweet nostalgia and longing that she deems as a dangerous and slippery slope once someone allows himself/herself to delve deeply into it. As insane as joy seems, I find myself wanting it, since most of my life experiences to this moment seem more like pleasure than joy. Perhaps because the ultimate disposability and evanescence of pleasure seems rather representative of my generation’s increasing awareness of the general fleetingness of things, and their skepticism of all the tropes (a house, a family, a career, the suburban life…) previously associated (mostly via Hollywood and other mass media) with a “joyous” life. My generation is one that has grown up seeing about half of all marriages end in divorce. We’ve seen the real estate market and the stock market collapse a few times, and have been brought up in a world where natural disasters, terrorism and apocalyptic doom are not feared as much as expected. Because we have grown up in the age of market instability, escalating debt and climate change, we are much more desirous of short-term satisfaction and contentment. We’d rather travel, eat amazing food, see movies, have adventures, and live via moment-by-moment tweets and Insta-documents, quickly forgotten; we’d rather live in the

present-tense than build for anything long-term. As sad as it sounds, most of the people in my generation prefer fantasy over reality, and would rather have a lifetime of pleasure instead of a lifetime of joy. Though, all hope is not lost. Though, as Smith elucidated, I agree that pleasure is distinct from joy; but I also think that the two are very closely linked, as pleasure can often be a catalyst for joy. And perhaps the more pleasurable experiences one has, the easier ones chances of finding joy can be.