By Michaella Thornton
Charlotte Brontë wrote in Jane Eyre, “I would always rather be happy than dignified.” There’s something particularly moving to me about this line spoken by the somber and thoughtful Jane, a character who wasn’t treated gently or kindly in most of her sad, constricted Victorian life.
Even Jane knew “joy is not made to be a crumb,” as Mary Oliver wrote in her poem, “Don’t Hesitate.” And yet, the thing that sometimes seems to be not serious enough for one’s writing process, let alone as a theme in one’s writing, is joy.
Perhaps part of this reluctance to celebrate, to elevate the pursuit of pleasure and happiness is that joy, by design, is short-lived in nature. Sure, contemporary writers such as Ross Gay and J. Drew Lanham contemplate the sacred, fleeting beauty of the everyday, and such a celebration of delight is, in fact, a rebellion, especially in a world where earnestness isn’t always valued or seen as the layered, feathered thing it is.
Part of me thinks the tide is turning on how we reflect joy, delight, and the Gen-Z reclamation of the word “wholesome” in our art.
When I was in graduate school in the early aughts, we read and discussed art critic Suzi Gablik’s 1984 book, Has Modernism Failed? We rejoiced that earnestness was back! Social good could be resurrected through our art and consumerist greed wouldn’t, couldn’t, be our only muse.
Here we are, 40 years after Gablik’s groundbreaking work was first published, and I think now is the time to revel in, to continue to write about delight, to fist-pump joy in the face of all the ways the world will, without fail, wear us all down.
Mark Doty knew the score when he asked in the final lines of his beautiful poem, “Visitation,” “What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”
Or as Li-Young Lee wrote in his beloved poem, “From Blossoms”:
“O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days”
Joy is the orchard, and life the shade, and, as writers, I look forward to more of us exploring the transitory sweetness of our days.
Read Kella’s other work here at Reckon.
Michaella Thornton
Michaella Thornton learned how to bake at the hips of her mother and her grandmother Anna Lee. A lifetime ago, she baked professionally before realizing baker’s hours require early mornings. Kella’s prose has been featured in Brevity, Essay Daily, Fractured Lit, Hobart After Dark, Reckon Review, New South, Southeast Review, among others, and her writing has been nominated for a James Beard award and Best of the Net. Many moons ago, Kella received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri with her daughter.