Learning More About Joyous Existence
(in a world predisposed to pleasure)
This year’s theme of the Hannah Arendt Center Conference, an annual conference held at Bard College around the time of Hannah Arendt’s birthday, was titled “JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times.” As a practicing Catholic, my mind is often devoted to seeking joy and denying pleasures. Admittedly, the way I define joy for my own life aligns almost exactly with modern Catholic teaching. The King James version of Matthew, which reads “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you”, sums up my vision of joy-seeking in this world (Matthew 6:33). So long as our worldly life glorifies God, we shall be joyous in this life and the next.
Though I am frequently in academic spaces, having attended Bard College, I often find myself hiding my religious self. It seems to me that in an increasingly secular society, and an increasingly scientific society (by that I mean that truth-telling seems to almost always correlate with scientific discovery as people have rejected and forgotten moral and spiritual truths), I worry that my Catholic identity will somehow diminish my perceived intelligence. It is as if any thought I have to offer could be considered valuable and introspective until I reveal that these opinions are rooted in God and my love for Him. One can only imagine my relief when figures such as St. Augustine, fictional characters such as Father Mapple from Moby Dick, and direct quotes from the Old and New Testaments, were almost consistently brought in by many of the speakers of the conference. Whether or not the panelists were of any Christian background (most of them were not) is entirely irrelevant to my relief. What is beautiful about any religion is its ability to spread truth to its listeners, whether or not one is a believer or practicer of that religion, a truth that is not rooted in tangible evidence, but one’s childlike ability to believe without seeing.
To me, that is how I can sum up joy. “Believing without seeing” a cliche phrase most commonly heard around Christmas-time, is the first step to living a joyous life. It does not mean turning a blind eye to whatever is in front of us, nor navigating this world in ignorance. To live a joyous life is to presuppose the existence of joy, seeing the beauty in everything and everyone, acknowledging the presence of suffering, all while doing one’s best not to succumb to one’s vices. To see all human beings for their humanity, not for their sins, while allowing space for judgment ONLY in order to maintain a joyous world. As framed by Roger Berkowitz’s opening statements in summarizing Arendt’s words in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,
“Eichmann, She concluded, must die — not from vengeance nor from a refusal of forgiveness — but from fidelity to the world itself. What he did was simply irreconcilable with a human world. We must, Arendt writes, say ‘no’ to the world in which such crimes occur — not to erase them from memory, but to ensure that they remain beyond the possibility of affirmation and reconciliation. We must hang Eichmann, in other words, to affirm that the world we love is one in which people who do what he did are not welcome. We hang Eichmann, Arendt argues, not because of who he is, but to affirm our solidarity with the world that we can love.”
As a writer, I did not come here to merely sum up joy, but to offer my long-winded thoughts of how I now perceive joy following the conference. I do not believe my definition of joy has changed, but it has expanded. Every, yes every, panelist offered something equally insightful and useful for my contemplations (even if the use served to lead me towards what I do not believe joy to be). I suppose the speaker that I will be highlighting below is the one whose words brought me the most joy. That is to say, not those whose words excited me the most in the moment, whose melodious speeches bounced around between my ears like church bells, coaxing laughter and pleasure, for then I would be quoting the panels of two geniuses, Teju Cole and Bill T. Jones. No, the speaker who brought me the most joy is an individual who made me feel humbled to even be in their presence, the one who made me feel grateful to be able to listen to their words, someone who was able to perceive my heart and hold it gently in their hands. I suppose it was someone who I felt welcomed my vulnerability as though they were speaking directly to me. Their words have stayed with me because they spoke truths that I could not have recognized otherwise - this theme of the link between joy and pain being omnipresent for the duration of the conference.
The last panel of the conference featured two writers: Wyatt Mason and Shane McCrae. It seemed that I was predestined to appreciate their talk the most because I quickly found a friend in Wyatt when getting to know him the day before at the conference’s opening night dinner Thursday evening. I knew nothing about him except that his name was Wyatt and ensured that the conversation’s focus was on me the entire time, something that placed me wildly out of my comfort zone as I tend to lead all conversations, ensuring that the conversation is always on the other person. I discovered that we both approached conversations in the same manner, but be it that he was a smart man double my age, he swiftly took charge of the conversation with ease. Without knowing exactly how we got to this topic, I found myself telling him about my recent quarter-life crisis that was solved now that I found my sense of purpose in this world, implying that this was a permanent solution. Without ever making me feel lesser, inviting me into vulnerable conversation, he smiled and chuckled, saying, “darling, it’s not just a quarter-life crisis, it’s an everyday crisis”, implying with his wisdom that my solution was far from permanent. Towards the end of our tête-à-tête, I was finally able to ask the question burning in my brain: Who Are You? This question tempted me much like the “Drink Me” bottle that tempted Alice. The answer to my question triggered the exact same result as it did for Alice, I seemed to shrink smaller and smaller.
This man, Wyatt, tells me of his position as a writer for the New York Times, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, his time at Bennington as a professor, and his current occupation as a writer in residence at Bard College. Oh, and that he was a panelist the following day at the conference. Despite this, his humility begged me to grow back to my normal size, rather than swimming in a pool of my own tears as Alice did. We felt like equals, like two human beings, even in the face of his great accomplishments and my lack thereof. His willingness to allow me to be vulnerable was able to bring me joy, and I like to think that the innocent and naive musings of an almost 25-year-old brought him a similar level of joy. The trust I had in him was the leading, if not only, factor that empowered me to ask a question during the Q&A portion of the panel (and I saw it as the sole opportunity I had to ask him meaningful questions in return).
Wyatt opened with the poem The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins. After this recitation, he tells us:
“I was very sick this summer for the first time in my life and my mind was not my own.” He goes on to explain that this poem, The Windhover, was something he “felt compelled to learn by heart.” He questioned why he needed to learn this poem by heart, and the deeper meaning of what it is to take something into your heart. He dove into the etymology of the word “memory”, and how committing something to memory was first thought of as a faculty of the brain, but evolved into a faculty of the heart. Wyatt introduces an example of this evolution in Saint Jerome’s translation - the Vulgate - where a Greek word for “mind” was translated as “heart.” “Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).
It was at this point that my soul felt glued to his words. His opening statements of raw emotion used in conjunction with references to the Gospel made me feel as though I was once again being drawn out of myself in an illustration of unrefined human emotion. I could almost reach out and touch the souls of everyone in the audience and the two men on stage.
Wyatt shifts his talk by introducing us further to Gerard Manley Hopkins, originally an Anglican who then converted to Catholicism, giving sermons and writing poetry that closely aligned with his spiritual journey. He reads a excerpt from one of Hopkins’ sermons, one that I shorten even further here:
“what we call heart is not the piece of flesh so called, not the great bloodvessel only but the thoughts of the mind that vessel seems to harbour and the feelings of the soul to which it beats. For the heart is of all the members of the body the one which most strongly and most of its own accord sympathises with and expresses in itself what goes on within the soul.”
With this, he amazes at Hopkins’ awe with a bird that inspired him to write such a poem as The Windhover. It is this amazement that allows him to answer his own question as to why he memorized this poem by heart. I myself waited with bated breath, perhaps hoping to have my own questions answered as to why I memorize certain songs, committing certain lines to heart. I hoped his reasoning would lead me to discover mine. His answer:
“My mind, and perhaps your minds too, are overrun now with thoughts that are unthinkable. And I think we think that there’s work we can do with our minds to unthink those things...My sense is that the “mind has mountains; cliffs of fall”...this space in which we’re precarious, where we’re at risk of a deep failure, a failure of mind. And the only recourse, it seems to me, is the body, and the recognition that fundamentally we are oral creatures; and fundamentally, the pleasure that we get from being human is in utterance, conversation, connection through that means. And often, and I think now more than ever, the capacity for, the opportunity for, direct communication with others...is face to face. It’s very hard to find people who will face you, who will correspond with you, who will connect with you. And it is my sense that in the learning-by-heart-of-things, we find a space in which, in our bodies, we can live...It [joy] feels very at arm’s length. It feels like something that just happens. I feel you can make it happen by letting things live in you which are hard to invite in. And yet, can bring life.”
I quote his final statements almost in full because of how strongly they touched my heart and how quickly my follow-up questions seeped out of my arteries and into my brain. I saw the flow of logic before my very eyes, sufficient conditions following one after the other, yet I was missing the final necessary condition. This was the answer that I wanted, that I needed to complete the puzzle. After the conclusion of Wyatt’s and Shane’s talk, I posed to them the final question of the panel, and the final question of the entire conference.
With an embarrassingly quivering voice, I asked:
“I’m curious about the correlation between vulnerability and joy, or from a Christian perspective, humility and joy. I’m wondering: If we allow ourselves to be vulnerable with ourselves, by allowing our heart to council our body, would you say we have a duty to share our heart with others? Is being vulnerable with others the path to joy? Does communication require vulnerability, or do the two exist together without separation?”
7:32:48
It seemed to me that there was a formula: allow your heart to council your body, be vulnerable with yourself, be vulnerable with others, be joyful! Since my brain works best in logical sequences, I was curious to see if I followed this thinking correctly, how Wyatt and Shane understood this logic, and if I could adopt it into my own life. Essentially, I was publicly asking for advice from two men that I barely knew, but learned to respect greatly because of their honest vulnerability.
After asking my question, Shane and Wyatt both smile. Shane presses his finger into the spot where the eyebrow and temple meet, like a caricature of someone thinking, and remarks “Sure, let me just whip up an answer to that.” He ends up offering a beautiful answer, seeing the connection between humility and joy as making more sense to him, and stating that “trying to be humble creates space for the noticing of things that can make one joyful.” Coming from a Christian perspective, this filled me with unexplainable warmth, perhaps because of the familiar nature of his words growing up Catholic.
Wyatt’s answer concluded the conference with possibly one of the most beautiful responses I had heard throughout my two days there.
“I think if I’m honest, and perhaps you’ll find this true in your own hearts, that as one grows older, life grows properly humbling. Everything happens to everyone and it’s all very different, we have no idea what other people are carrying with them. But we know they’re carrying a lot. I see quite clearly all the masks I’ve worn to date, but I can’t know the mask I’m wearing now. When I taught for BPI, the Bard Prison Initiative, one of my students said, and who knew far more and far better than I, he said: ‘When you’re in a cell, and you are there for a number of years, you have to put on armor in order to survive that experience. At a certain point, the day comes where you’re looking at yourself in the mirror and you realize you’re wearing a mask.’ And he did this motion...”
*Wyatt imitates taking a mask off of one’s face and hanging it up on a hook, like one does with a hat*
“I don’t think you can know anything until you begin that process. And I know that I’m only at the beginning of that process, and I just want it to continue. And I do find that having these better words than my own in me furthers that.”
His response answered my questions in a way that was quite unexpected. In following his advice, his words, which I can easily define as “better words than my own” will remain in my heart forever. And that, I conclude, is my definition of joy.
Thank you to all those at the Hannah Arendt Center for hosting a conference that brought me everlasting joy.