Schiller, in his famous Ode to Joy, declared that joy is the divine spark in all of us. Beethoven centered his last great work, the 9th Symphony, on this theme. Yet there is, at present, not a single entrance in the English Wikipedia under “joy.” It’s become a somewhat quaint concept, at the same time at which beauty has become largely siliconized.
Do the current presidential elections have any room 
for beauty and joy? Well, yes, in the sense of the German “Schadenfreude” – malicious joy in slandering, maligning, and foreseeing the defeat of other Americans, and then the world.
What if we tried to rebuild a sense of joy, creating moments of submerging our whole being in beauty, to be truly born again, not by polluting clear waters with our dogmatized sins, but by contributing the only worthy gift back to our universe, beauty and childlike joy in 
beauty, this moment, not in the past nor planned for a better future, but now? It is an old idea, offered by the wise from many cultures and historic periods. Why is it so difficult to retain beauty and joy in our daily lives? Why do we prefer the ugly and the nasty, the lies of the hard sell, the desperate pleading for a chance to corrupt whatever beauty there may be?
Joy is when my favorite blogger is back online. Seriously.
Remembering a recent article in the Bangladesh Times, I wonder if seriousness is the opposite of joy, its annihilator. Or can a cellist feel joy in his art only because he takes it so seriously?
Perhaps taking our art seriously means that we have arrested our forward motion and are subjecting ourselves instead to an official interrogation.