The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.

[soso]

On joy

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. 

I am almost committing an indecency. 

I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you

—[the secret //which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence: 

[the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent,

 we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves:

 [the secret () we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. 

We cannot tell it /because it is a desire for something //that has never actually appeared /in our experience. 

We cannot hide it /because our experience is constantly suggesting it, 

and we betray ourselves /like lovers at the mention of a name. 

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave /as if that had settled the matter.

Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past.

But all this is a cheat. 

If Wordsworth had gone back /to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself,

but only the reminder of it; [what he remembered] would turn out to be /itself [a remembering]. 

[The books or the music //in which we thought () [the beauty was located] will betray us /if we trust to them;

it was not in them, it only came through them, and [what came through them] was longing. 

* trust to something ; to depend on something such as luck or chance to help you to achieve something,

  usually because you have no other choice.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; 

but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. 

For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower () we have not found,

the echo of a tune () we have not heard, news from a country () we have never yet visited. . .

Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be re-united with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, 

[to be on the inside of some door //which we have always seen from the outside], is no mere neurotic fancy, 

but the truest index of our real situation. 

And [to be at last summoned inside] would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache. . . 

The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.

From The Weight of Glory
Compiled in Words to Live By