Joy

Mon May 15 2023

Eight years ago I read Anna Karenina in a cold and dark storeroom. I don't remember the plot exactly now, but I remember how I felt. I remember it gripped me from start to end. I remember viscerally feeling Anna's aching passion and her pain, and when I read that final, climactic scene, it felt like a train had hit me, too. I read that part a dozen times, reliving it again and again before I had to put the book down. I felt a sickening sense of loss. My heart pounded hard and my chest felt incredibly tight, stretched taut almost to breaking underneath my admin tee. Jaye and Benny were only inches away from me. But in that moment I felt incredibly distant, my mind and body transported to a time long ago, a place far away. Reading that book gave me joy.

I took many modules in college, and enjoyed all of them. Learning new things gave me joy. I enjoyed working through particularly tricky proofs in Logic, Analysis, and Game Theory. I enjoyed very much thinking through Berlin and Nozick. I worked hardest for PolSoc and my thesis. I remember lying on the couch in the PPE room with my feet up and my eyes closed, thinking very hard in my repose. I'd fill the whiteboard with papers, summaries, regression equations. Occasionally I'd sneak a peek at Julia Stadlmann--hard at work with some derivation or other--and sometimes she'd catch me and grace me with a smile and giggle. That gave me joy. I enjoyed parking the disparate readings into different camps, finding methodological errors in the papers, and finally synthesising everything into a theory of my own. I came to every insight with nothing but the Feynman method, and that exercise of my mental faculties gave me joy.

I talked to so many people about my thesis, who lavished me with help I didn't deserve. I was in Tak Huen's attic room. I was in the common room of 59 with Filip, Nina, and Martin. I was in Bassel's garden, talking until the sun went down. I was in Nuffield quad and Andy's office. I was in my room writing code until the sunrise. All of that was pain, uncertainty, and stress. But at the end, when the results aligned almost exactly with my predictions, I felt that I had discovered some truth about the world. A contingent, a posteriori, wishy-washy sort of truth, but a truth nonetheless. That gave me joy. And I felt unadulterated joy when Celine and I received our results atop Kühlenbronn, with the sun in our eyes and the cool mountain air in our lungs.

Last year I started playing frisbee. Why do I play it? It keeps me fit and lets me meet new people, but those reasons are only incidental. I play for the brute joy of running down the field as quickly as I can and jumping as high as I can. That raw exercise of my physical capacities is joyful to me. There is beauty in the game too, which I'm starting to appreciate. There is beauty when a play is executed nicely, when the disc moves swiftly from strike to strike and then put nicely and cleanly to score in the endzone. There is beauty when someone reads the disc so well that he grabs it out perfectly from two defenders. Those things give me joy.

Some time ago I had my heart broken. We spent one intimate and vulnerable night together. That gave me joy. Then I spent many sleepless nights alone feeling pain, anguish, and overall very sorry for myself. But I felt like I hadn't felt in years--a full-bodied, hot-blooded grief--and that gave me joy too.