The Joyful Heart | Page 3

them. Thus the joy of anticipatory creation is akin to pain. It holds no such pure bliss as actual creation. When you are in full swing, what you have just finished (unless you are exhausted) seems to you nearly always the best piece of work that you have ever done. For your critical, inhibitory apparatus is temporarily paralyzed by the intoxication of the moment. What makes so many artists fail at these times to enjoy a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of its opposite, is that they do not train their bodies "like a strong man to run a race," and make and keep them aboundingly vital. The actual toil takes so much of their meager vitality that they have too little left with which to enjoy the resulting achievement. If they become ever so slightly intoxicated over the work, they have a dreadful morning after, whose pain they read back into the joy preceding. And then they groan out that all is vanity, and slander joy by calling it a pottle of hay.
It takes so much vitality to enjoy achievement because achievement is something finished. And you cannot enjoy what is finished in art, for instance, without re-creating it for yourself. But, though re-creation demands almost as much vital overplus as creation, the layman should realize that he has, as a rule, far more of this overplus than the pallid, nervous sort of artist. And he should accordingly discount the other's lamentations over the vanity of human achievement.
The reason why Hazlitt took no pleasure in writing, and in having written, his delicious essays is that he did not know how to take proper care of his body. To be extremely antithetical, I, on the other hand, take so much pleasure in writing and in having written these essays of mine (which are no hundredth part as beautiful, witty, wise, or brilliant as Hazlitt's), that the leaden showers of drudgery, discouragement, and disillusionment which accompany and follow almost every one of them, and the need of Spartan training for their sake, hardly displace a drop from the bucket of joy that the work brings. Training has meant so much vital overplus to me that I long ago spurted and caught up with my pottle of joy. And, finding that it made a cud of unimagined flavor and durability, I substituted for the pottle a placard to this effect:
REMEMBER THE RACE!
This placard, hung always before me, is a reminder that a decent respect for the laws of good sportsmanship requires one to keep in as hard condition as possible for the hundred-yard dash called Life. Such a regimen pays thousands of per cent. in yearly dividends. It allows one to live in an almost continual state of exaltation rather like that which the sprinter enjoys when, after months of flawless preparation, he hurls himself through space like some winged creature too much in love with the earth to leave it; while every drop of his tingling blood makes him conscious of endless reserves of vitality.
Tingling blood is a reagent which is apt to transmute all things into joy--even sorrow itself. I wonder if any one seriously doubts that it was just this which was giving Browning's young David such a glorious time of it when he broke into that jubilant war-whoop about "our manhood's prime vigor" and "the wild joys of living."
The physical variety of exuberance, once won, makes easy the winning of the mental variety. This, when it is almost isolated from the other kinds, is what you enjoy when you soar easily along over the world of abstract thought, or drink delight of battle with your intellectual peers, or follow with full understanding the phonographic version of some mighty, four-part fugue. To attain this means work. But if your body is shouting for joy over the mere act of living, mental calisthenics no longer appear so impossibly irksome. And anyway, the discipline of your physical training has induced your will to put up with a good deal of irksomeness. This is partly because its eye is fixed on something beyond the far-off, divine event of achieving concentration on one subject for five minutes without allowing the mind to wander from it more than twenty-five times. That something is a keenness of perception which makes any given fragment of nature or human nature or art, however seemingly barren and commonplace, endlessly alive with possibilities of joyful discovery--with possibilities, even, of a developing imagination. For the Auto-Comrade, your better self, is a magician. He can get something out of nothing.
At this stage of your development you will probably discover in yourself enough mental adroitness and power of concentration to enable you to weed discordant thoughts out of the mind. As you wander through your mental pleasure-grounds, whenever you come upon