The next Move was intellectual, and consolidated the first Move. I read in Alexander's Space Time and Deity his theory of "Enjoyment" and "Contemplation." These are technical terms in Alexander's philosophy; "Enjoyment" has nothing to do with pleasure, nor "Contemplation" with the contemplative life. When you see a table you "enjoy" the act of seeing and "contemplate" the table. Later, if you took up Optics and thought about Seeing itself, you would be contemplating the seeing and enjoying the thought. ... We do not "think a thought" in the same sense in which we "think that Herodotus is unreliable." When we think a thought, "thought" is a cognate accusative (like "blow" in "strike a blow"). We enjoy the thought (that Herodotus is unreliable) and, in so doing, contemplate the unreliability of Herodotus.

I accepted this distinction at once and have ever since regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought. ... It seemed to me self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to the woman is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid. But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object. In other words the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment. ... This was not merely a logical result of Alexander's analysis, but could be verified in daily and hourly experience. The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust was to turn your attention from the girl or insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look "inside ourselves" and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or track or byproduct for the activities themselves. That is how many men may come to believe that thought is only unspoken words, or the appreciation of poetry only a collection of mental pictures, when these are in reality are what the thought or the appreciation, when interrupted, leave behind. ... We do not love, fear, or think without knowing it. Instead of the twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious, we need a threefold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated.

This discovery flashed a new light back on my whole life. I saw that in all my waitings and watching for Joy, all my vain hope to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, "This is it," had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. ... I knew now that they were merely the mental track left by the passage of Joy - not the wave but the wave's imprint on the sand.

There was no doubt that Joy was a desire. But a desire is turned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes all its character to its object. Erotic love is not like desire for food, nay, a love for one woman differs from a love for another woman in the very same way and the very same degree as the two women differ from one another. ... The form of the desired is in the desire. ... Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. ... Inexorably Joy proclaimed, "You want - I myself am your want of - something other, outside, not you nor any state of you." I did not yet ask, Who is the desired? only What is it? But this brought me already into the region of awe, for I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired. 

“What, in conclusion, of joy? For that, after all, is what the story has mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian. I cannot, indeed, complain, like Wordsworth, that the visionary gleam has passed away. I believe (if the thing were at all worth recording) that the old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. 

But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, ” Look! ” The whole party gathers round and stares. 

But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. ” We would be at Jerusalem.”

CS Lewis, surprised by joy

“Indeed the best thing about happiness itself,” Lewis writes, “is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money . . .”

Nicholi, Armand (2002-04-03). The Question of God (p. 106). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Although Lewis believes that all forms of pleasure, fun, happiness, and joy come from God, who gives these freely for all to enjoy, he admits that these earthly pleasures never completely satisfy us. “We have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy,” Lewis writes, but they never quite satisfy our yearnings. God withholds from us “the settled happiness and security which we all desire.” Otherwise, Lewis says, we would think this world our home rather than a place we are passing through. He writes that the Creator “refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant Inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for our home.”

Nicholi, Armand (2002-04-03). The Question of God (p. 105). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

I would beg six days, to be allowed to preach the seventh