The Outward-Directedness of Joy

The Outward-Directedness of Joy names a central distinction in C. S. Lewis’s account of desire: Joy is not a feeling to be generated, collected, or treated as an end in itself. It arises when attention is given to something beyond the self, and its meaning comes from that object. The memoir traces the cost of reversing this direction: the effort to recapture a mental state turns experience into self-observation, while the pursuit of Joy’s true object leads the narrator beyond aesthetic experience and, ultimately, toward religious belief.

Definition and Direction of Desire

The principle begins with a difference between an experience and what the experience is about. Lewis recalls that he had once made a similar mistake in religious life, seeking states of mind through prayer instead of attending to God. In his imaginative life he repeated the error when he complained that the old thrill was becoming rare. The complaint assumed that the desired thing was a thrill, a condition within himself. But the thrill, he argues, occurs only when attention and desire are fixed on something else: a distant mountain, the past, or the gods of Asgard. It is a byproduct of attention directed outward, not an object that can be pursued on its own.

To make the inward sensation the goal is, in Lewis’s account, to mistake an effect for its source. If a feeling could be produced internally by effort or drugs, removing its object would leave only images, a bodily flutter, or a momentary abstraction. Such a residue could not supply what had made the experience valuable. The same reversal recurs across different parts of life: prayer can become a self-directed indulgence, and love can be turned into a concern with one’s own state. The error is not simply that a person tries too hard to feel something; it is that attention has been redirected from the thing desired to the experience of desiring it.

The Failure of Self-Monitoring

When Joy’s association with Northernness began to fade, Lewis interpreted the change incorrectly. Rather than concluding that its object lay further beyond him than even a mythology, he supposed that Joy was an inner mood that might arise in any setting. He began trying to get the experience again: while reading poems, listening to music, or walking, he watched his own mind for the first signs of it and attempted to hold on when it appeared.

The result was unstable. The opening of the world of beauty sometimes swept aside his self-conscious efforts, allowing him to taste Joy through self-forgetfulness. More often, his impatience frightened the experience away; when it did arrive, introspection quickly disrupted it. By treating Joy as a sensation to be captured, he both obstructed the experience and distorted its significance. Later, he recognizes that the images and bodily sensations he had watched for were only traces left by Joy, not Joy itself. They served as reminders of something else, and their failure to satisfy was evidence that they had never been the ultimate object.

This account also distinguishes Joy from sexual pleasure without treating the distinction as a contest between a morally superior and inferior pleasure. Lewis describes repeatedly mistaking erotic possibilities in imaginative settings for what he wanted. When that pursuit yielded pleasure, the result was not a moral shock or a discovery that the pleasure was too low. It was simply beside the point: the desired object had been mistaken. The comparison is one of misdirected pursuit, not a judgment that sexual pleasure could substitute successfully for Joy. The episode reinforces the principle’s central test: an experience may be real and pleasurable while still failing to answer the desire that led toward it.

From Experience to Object

Lewis’s later reflection on introspection gives the principle a more systematic form. Turning attention inward can interrupt activities that had been underway, leaving behind images and bodily sensations. Those remnants may then be mistaken for the activity itself. Applied to Joy, this means that the mind’s observable contents—the image of Asgard, a remembered landscape, or a bodily quiver—are not the desire in its living direction. They are what remains available to inspection once attention has turned away from the object.

The distinction reaches beyond Joy. Desire, Lewis argues, takes its character from what it desires. Love for one person differs from love for another because the objects differ; desire for one wine differs in tone from desire for another. The object shapes the desire as harsh or sweet, coarse or refined, and makes it desirable or hateful. Thus Joy cannot be understood as a uniform inner event whose value is independent of its object. Its meaning depends on what lies beyond the self toward which it is directed.

Lewis arrives at this conclusion by eliminating the candidates he had treated as possible objects: first imagined settings and bodily states, and finally Joy considered as an aesthetic experience in itself. None proves adequate. He does not yet identify the desired object as God at this stage; he understands instead that it is not a state of his own mind or body. This recognition opens, in his retrospective account, a way out of the self: desire encounters something objective, not reducible to sensory objects, biological or social needs, imagination, or a private mental condition.

Religious Development and Retrospective Meaning

The memoir connects this account of outward desire to a sequence of religious changes, while distinguishing those stages rather than treating them as one conversion. At Oldie’s school, Lewis became an effective believer after hearing Christian doctrines taught by men who evidently believed them. He began to pray, read the Bible, and try to obey his conscience. He later describes becoming an apostate through intellectual and occult interests that, despite their lack of logical connection, shared an opposition to Christianity. These earlier episodes establish that religious belief, imaginative experience, and later conversion are related in his life but not interchangeable.

The later analysis of Joy changes the meaning of his imaginative history without making imagination itself equivalent to faith. Lewis describes imagination as capable of reflecting heavenly truth, but insists that the lower imaginative experience does not by itself begin or produce the higher life of the spirit. In his account, the resemblance is one of reflection: imagination can bear the shape of a reality it cannot supply. Joy’s importance therefore lies not in the sensation considered as a private possession, but in its capacity to direct desire toward what exceeds it.

This distinction informs the memoir’s account of his 1929 surrender to theism and his later Christian conversion. In the Trinity Term of 1929, Lewis admitted that God was God, knelt, and prayed. He stresses that this was a conversion to theism, not yet to Christianity, and that he did not initially understand God as connected with Joy. His recognition of the Incarnation came later, during a journey to Whipsnade: he set out not believing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and arrived believing it. These stages matter because the outward-directedness of Joy is not presented as a shortcut that instantly delivers Christian doctrine. It is part of a longer movement in which the desired object becomes more concrete and more compelling.

Significance After Conversion

After becoming a Christian, Lewis says, Joy’s old emotional force did not necessarily disappear. The bittersweet experience continued to come, sometimes as sharply as before. What changed was his understanding of its importance. He no longer treated the experience as a state of mind with value in itself; he understood it as a pointer to something beyond the self. Before the object had been recognized, the pointer commanded attention. Once the road was found, it no longer needed to be stared at in the same way.

The principle thus recasts both frustration and recurrence. Joy’s failure to be retained is not merely a loss: it exposes the mistake of treating a sign, sensation, or imaginative image as the destination. The experience remains meaningful precisely because it directs away from itself. Its decisive function is not to provide a private, reproducible pleasure, but to disclose the outward orientation of desire and to help the narrator recognize that what he seeks is not contained within him.