"I took a stool at the bar of a tavern in John Reister's town and had ordered a beer and a plate of fish tacos when the skies outside opened up and the rain began to fall in torrents in the parking lot, forming instantaneous puddles, and as it did something strange swept over me. I hesitate to describe it, as if we should keep these things to ourselves.
At that moment, with the fish tacos in front of me and the rain pouring down outside, I felt a wave of joy pass through me as intense as any sudden grief. Pass through me in surges, so I had to bury my face in my hands. If the bartender had turned to look at me, he would've thought I was heaving with sorrow, that I had just received news of some terrible event, but it was precisely the opposite. Others were sitting nearby talking, drinking, dipping french fries into ketchup. And I was trembling with an inner laughter that resembled sobs.
We grope for words to describe emotions like this because they're so mysterious. It's like a tree suddenly swaying but with no wind to move it. We jump for joy or fly into a rage or burst into laughter for a reason, usually. There was no cause in this case: a full-body surge of joy at simply being there. The sight of the rain. The taste of the beer. The warmth of the tavern. The compactness of my belongings beside me in my pack. The simplicity of my life at that exact moment. Who knows why?
Thoreau touched on this in a letter to a friend: "We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it." The next afternoon—I jump ahead—a slanting snow blew in from the northwest as I walked along the edge of a field, a barn in the distance, cows in a pasture, and the same wave hit me. I doubled over along the roadside.
Again, a sudden surge of joy that came on like a sob for no reason, but with every reason. Something was moving inside. I must assume, and hope, that we all have these moments. That we are all similarly stricken when walking along a road or sitting at a bar. These moments are the reward for being, as though the earth were sending its voltage through us.
Marcel Proust famously had his moment with his spoonful of madeleine dunked into tea. "No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place," he wrote in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin." It was "an all-powerful joy," an "unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its existence."
As Proust's fictionalized self digs, and probes, and sips more madeleine crumbs, memories flood back. Those crumbs have the power to reawaken past days and unearth the dead. The whole of his childhood village of Combray emerges in his cup of tea. My joy had nothing to do with memory or the past, though I could recount other such surges, and many since my diagnosis. Bolts of beauty, we might call them, sure to become more numerous as I went. I could still feel its glow when I finished that lunch and walked into the rain. *"
— American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal by Neil King
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