1. Who is Zadie Smith, and why should we pay attention to her essay?
  2. In what ways does Smith “distinguish between joy and pleasure” and how do these distinctions match up with your own interpretations of the two experiences?
  3. According to Smith, why is joy difficult to manage, and live with? Do you agree with her? Why or why not? Practice using a complete Quote Sandwich (utilizing a direct quote from the essay) within your response.
  4. In a well-developed paragraph, respond to the following question: What’s the value of reading about, thinking about, and discussing joy?
  5. How does Smith’s essay overlap or connect or contradict previous readings from this semester?

d

  1. Zadie Smith is an English author who has written many novels, essays, and short stories. Her essay, “Joy”, examines what she believes to be an important distinction between everyday pleasures and true joy, as well as her personal history with joy as a complicated emotion. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of Smith’s points, her essay is still important to pay attention to because it offers a close look at how she interprets joy as an individual, which can provide insight into one’s own experiences with joy, whether they are similar or vastly different.
  2. Zadie Smith defines the distinction between pleasure and joy more or less in how much it hurts to lose them. According to Smith, “The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth”, but joy “hurts just as much as it is worth”(9). By separating Joy and pleasure by their value, Smith proposes that although pleasure is a much easier emotion, joy brings life depth that pleasure cannot attain. However in doing so, Smith creates a complete separation between joy and pleasure that I do not find to be useful in practice. Many times I experienced joy in moments that were not as profound or ephemeral as Smith’s definition of joy. There is definitely something to be said for finding joy in life’s moments of greatest impact, but often I’ve found that the true value of joy is that it can be sought and found in even small moments, or moments then tend towards absolute hopelessness.
  3. Smith discusses how, when compared to the comfort of pleasures, joy is quite often less desirable, even though it produces the defining moments of our lives. Smith states that joy is a difficult emotion because “it has very little real pleasure in it”(9). Smith’s belief that joy does not often carry with it the feel-good emotions that she associates with pleasure makes it easy to see why she would be uncertain about wanting to experience more instances of joy (1). However, even if I agreed with Smith’s definition of joy as moments of intense emotional highs, it doesn’t seem like that is completely separate from pleasure. The only thing that changes between how Smith describes an experience of joy and how she describes an experience of pleasure is the overall significance of the experience. She explains why there was joy when she fell in love and when she danced in a drug-induced frenzy, surrounded by similarly inebriated people. However, she doesn’t make the distinction that joy lacks pleasure until the end of her essay, and her own experiences don’t seem to support that claim. She makes it seem like joy and pleasure cannot be experienced simultaneously, but I believe that where joy can be found there must also be some pleasure along with it.
  4. The value that is derived from the discussion of joy is that discussing joy has a way of bringing it into the center of our view. When we discuss joy, consider its implications, and look back to times when we experienced joy, it forces us into a mindset where we are more inclined to look for joy in daily life. If we are making an effort to search for those moments of joy in life, it can help to clear away a bit of the overwhelming noise of negativity that we are so often bombarded with, be it from the high concentration of depressing news stories that come on the TV or the loudest voices on social media which too often echo the worst parts of humanity. There is value in bringing joy into life’s conversation because it has become an increasingly rare topic, even though joy is the most crucial ingredient to stand strong against adversity.
  5. While Smith’s interpretation of joy is that it comes about in life’s most intense and profound experiences, I think that DFW makes a valuable point about how individuals derive meaning from experiences that supports how joy is a choice rather than a reaction. DFW says that although we often examine how “the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people”, we rarely consider that the reason it means different things is because “how we construct meaning [is] actually a matter of personal, intentional choice” (Wallace 2). Here, DFW opposes the common idea that our beliefs are totally shaped by our surroundings, and that we have little to no control over them. If DFW is correct in his claim that we get to decide what has meaning and what doesn’t, as I believe he is, then it is reasonable to say that we also get to decide what brings us joy. However, Zadie Smith’s essay opposes the idea that joy is a choice, as she places great emphasis on experiences which cause joy.  She demonstrates her belief when she writes about how taking ecstasy and dancing at a club made her become a “small piece of joy” (Smith 7). It is clear from the importance that Smith places on the wild night at the club that she believes her situation caused her to become joy, rather than any conscious choice to find joy in the situation. While both DFW and Smith assert that there is a connection between our experiences and the meaning or emotions that are found in them, they each have opposite opinions about which is caused by the other.