Surprised by Joy

This morning I had free time and decided to run around the Kings river end of the lake. The decision was helped by constant and steady rain and a fair enough temperature of 12'C. By the way my temperature scale goes:

• less than 0'C  is freezing
• 0'C to 5'C is cold
• 5'C to 10'C is cool
• 10'C to 15'C is fair
• 15'C to 20'C is warm, ideal for most human activities
• 20'C to 25'C is hot, for many purposes too hot
• above 25'C is tropical and to be avoided

As a result of the rain, I suppose, I had the lake to myself. I had a minor ulterior motive to explore what was once Marlfields House shown in the 1888 map and a recent aerial photo courtesy of Bing maps below:

OSI 1888 25" map

Bing aerial map of same location

In the aerial photo there is an obvious difference in the vegetation and the merest suggestion of masonry. So I diverted from the shore but found nothing more than overgrown mounds, and the grass was wet and the drooping branches were dripping in a not very inviting way - perhaps I'll explore deeper into the woods on a finer day.

Kings river itself was in a fair spate but I had identified a good fording place on a previous run at the end of the dry season and able to wade across here albeit with the current tugging me.

Running barefoot in the rain through grass, mud and puddles is exhilarating. One has to keep up the tempo in order to keep warm and this impetus to run fast adds to the exhilaration. Naw, I hear you say, but you have not tried it. There is, of course, a certain mindset required to start out and it takes maybe a mile of plodding before any positive benefit is felt. You do have to battle through that first mile and that's where my ulterior motive had its use. Having got past this stage I cannot truthfully say that the whole experience was exhilarating (but neither is any other experience in life) but there were parts that were amazing. They might even have qualified for Lewis's concept of Surprised by Joy where he says: The feeling is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. 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 and that this Joy could not be sought because the very act of seeking diminished the thing being sought. Joy must sneak up on a person.

Rather like quantum mechanics where, we are told, it is not possible to precisely locate because the very act of seeing the object affects its position.

He rewords it here: It jumps under one’s ribs and tickles down one’s back and makes one forget meals and keeps one (delightedly) sleepless o’ nights. It shocks one awake when the other puts one to sleep. My private table is one second of joy is worth 12 hours of Pleasure from a recently discovered letter from Lewis to a Mrs Ellis.

Lewis says it much better in his fiction (isn't that what fiction is for?) - here from Perelandra and quoted in this site and in my previous post:

Now he had come to a part of the wood where great globes of yellow fruit hung from the trees-clustered as toy-balloons are clustered on the back of the balloon-man and about the same size. He picked one of them and turned it over and over... He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on Earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified. He could never tell us, when he came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, creamy or piercing. 'Not like that' was all he could ever say to such inquiries. As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favour of tasting this miracle again; the child-like innocence of fruit, the labours he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all seemed to commend the action. Yet something seemed opposed to this 'reason'. It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. 
...
Over his head there hung from a hairy tube-like branch a great spherical object, almost transparent, and shining. It held an area of reflected light in it and at one place a suggestion of rainbow colouring. So this was the explanation of the glass-like appearance in the wood. And looking round he perceived innumerable shimmering globes of the same kind in every direction. He began to examine the nearest one attentively. At first he thought it was moving, then he thought it was not. Moved by a natural impulse he put out his hand to touch it. Immediately his head, face, and shoulders were drenched with what seemed (in that warm world) an ice-cold shower bath, and his nostrils filled with a sharp, shrill, exquisite scent that somehow brought to his mind the verse in Pope, 'die of a rose in aromatic pain'. Such was the refreshment that he seemed to himself to have been, till now, but half awake. When he opened his eyes - which had closed involuntarily at the shock of moisture - all the colours about him seemed richer and the dimness of that world seemed clarified. A re-enchantment fell upon him. The golden beast at his side seemed no longer either a danger or a nuisance...  Looking at a fine cluster of the bubbles which hung above his head he thought how easy it would be to get up and plunge oneself through the whole lot of them and to feel, all at once, that magical refreshment multiplied tenfold. But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which had restrained him over-night from tasting a second gourd. He had always disliked the people who encored a favourite air in an opera-'That just spoils it' had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards... was it possibly the root of all evil?


If we include the intellect in with our senses, would it be true to say that this Joy is a function of our senses and thus wholly subjective? As opposed to having anything whatsoever to do with one's belief in God - in which case the joy in [Jesus] who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross must be something different. Indeed that joy could not have been momentary like Lewis's.  Certainly I can identify with Lewis's Joy, as I did this morning, but the other deferred-gratification kind I find harder, especially when the deference gets unmanageable long. And yet I do think they are linked, for was it not the promise of Joy that drove me to do the loony thing of enduring running through rain, mud and puddles this morning?

Irish railways

In a previous post I claimed to be a mild siderodromomaniac and so it is with considerable shame that I confess that I have only recently realised that the Irish track gauge is 5' 3" (1600mm) and not the standard gauge 4' 8.5" of the UK. You'd think...

Wikipedia has a nice animated map illustrating the progressive axing of railways in Ireland, similar to what happened in the UK under Beeching. Or here for a good history. Here is the best map I could find of the rail network before the axing. Click on the image to enlarge it or view the original.

So what? I hear you say. I find the past of interest when I discover remnants: reminders of days gone by. For example my post about the bridge over the Liffey that carried the Naas to Tullow line. Or when I hear glad tidings about plans to create more Irish greenways some of which use the course of disused railways. Here's one that is already open which I would like to explore. 

I sometimes look for remnants when running or by comparing on-line satellite imagery with old maps - see this post. Ordnance Survey Ireland (osi) has a handy on-line map viewer that can superimpose modern aerial imagery with historic maps dating back to 1830's and 1900's. 

And, whilst not wanting to grow older any faster than my present escalating rate, I look forward to using my promised free pass on all Irish public transport. 

Maps

Along with evaporated milk and Bruckner music I love maps. My first conscious memory of maps was at primary school where hung a black-and-white wall chart of Europe covering much the same area as the one below. The legend "Caspian Sea" in particular intrigued me.

Map: a representation, usually on a flat surface, as of the features of an area of the earth or a portion of the heavens, showing them in their respective forms, sizes, and relationships according to some convention of representation.

I would add that a map should also be pleasing to the eye and, above all, be optimised for its intended use. To achieve this features may be omitted, distorted or exaggerated to aid clarity. A good example being the London Underground map.

Central portion of the Tube map

Back in my youth, whilst my father drove, I liked to navigate using his brightly coloured Bartholomew half inch to the mile maps. I prided myself on not having to turn the map to face the direction of travel as my mother had to do.

example Bartholomew half inch map

One of the first things I do when or before I go to a new locality is to acquire and study a decent map and then to stake out the territory. But I know folk who, having lived in our house many years, still do not know how to find local places. Some have not even explored our own few acres of land.

GPS became operational in 1995. Several years before that I had contacted the OSI (Irish Ordnance Survey) with a proposal to engineer an in-car navigation system that supplemented dead reckoning from odometer data and a compass with digital mapping. When I visited the OSI they were then only in the process of digitising previous printed mapping so my proposal allowed for an interim solution that entailed me driving every road in Ireland whilst my dead reckoning sensors would be storing data that, after a bit of processing, would become a digital road map. My proposal never got off the ground, of course, and then GPS took over and made it all look a bit silly.

Uncle Sam

Not surprisingly I have welcomed the digital mapping revolution and the advent of GPS for which we have to thank Uncle Sam. I continue to be awed by the ability to utilise data from multiple satellites on my hand-held smart device to pin-point my location on a high definition map. Google Earth and Street View are likewise amazing achievements, and all these services are free for personal use! I am similarly awed by cell-phone technology, and so on. When I consider, for example, a daffodil, I think "you are going to die in a number of days and how can I enjoy your beauty as much as it deserves in that time?". Because there is beauty in good design. Youngsters today take all this technology for granted with no respect for the man-years of blood, sweat and tears implied. As a design engineer I figure I at least have some comprehension.

Bestal's Nutwood

When flying or in other public transport I like a window seat so that I can gorge myself on the passing landscape, maybe picking out would-be dream places to live, like Nutwood of Rupert Bear fame. And often I will be following my course on a map.

Journeys often start and end in the same place. I have adopted a sort of loose principle of life that such a route can be graded according to how much area it encloses. On this basis the worst thing is to come back the same way as you went. Similarly, when going from A to B, I like to explore different routes. If I have time on my hands I will choose a scenic route over a more direct motorway route. I differ radically from Ali in this respect: she likes to get from A to B as quickly and as smoothly as is possible.

In their spare time some sew, many spend vast amounts of time playing computer games, and others natter. For me, I can spend hours poring over maps. Even my doodles are usually some sort of map, often involving railways the surveying of which is made interesting by gradient and rate-of-turn constraint limitations.