But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.” I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.

I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. The quality common to the three experiences.

In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It was a sensation, of course, of desire but desire for what?.Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse. It is difficult or find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. The first is itself the memory of a memory. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.” But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet.

I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.

Lewis surprised by joy