Joy

‘Weep and you weep alone! - What a lie this is! Weep and you will find a

million crocodiles to weep with you. The world is forever weeping. The

world is drenched in tears… But joy, joy is a kind of ecstatic

bleeding, a disgraceful sort of contentment which overflows from every

pore of your being. You can’t make people joyous by being joyous

yourself. Joy has to be generated by oneself: it is or it isn’t. Joy

is founded on something too profound to be understood or communicated.

To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.


(Henry Miller)


Stirring. 

Artist’s conceit. He’s (intentionally?) misunderstanding the sense in which we’re supposed to weep alone in the conventional saying (“laugh, and the world laughs with you …”). Also, I think we can understand what makes us feel pleasure and well-being, although of course the description of personal sensations is always fraught with uncertainty that the words and images have the same meaning in others.