Joy
“…what I had felt…had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can known on earth; or rather, because the very nature of joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again [by joy], was itself again such a stabbing. The Desirable which had once alighted on [me] was now alighting on a particular moment of my past; and I would not recognize him there because, being an idolater and a formalist, I insisted that he ought to appear in the temple I had built him; not knowing that he cares only for temple building and not at all for temples built. Wordsworth, I believe, made this mistake all his life. I am sure that all that sense of the loss of vanished vision which fills The Prelude was itself vision of the same kind, if only he could have believed it.”
–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
