Tears of Joy in India

Abstract

Though myfifth birthday party was a long time ago, I can still clearly see scene: my mother's elderly parents had prepared a birthday cake with candles for me. It sat majestically on their white formica kitchen table. My frail grandfather turned off fluorescent light-fixture overhead and gently asked me to blow out thecandles. I did so as they sang Happy Birthday to You, and when grandfather turned bright lighting back on, I suddenly noticed they both were crying. Of course at that tender age, I associated tears only with pain, and I asked what was wrong. I think it was my grandmother who smiled and replied, Nothing is wrong. When you are older, you'll understand. -EdwardHoffmanAlthough tears of joy have been depicted in religious and literary sources in varied countries for centuries, this powerful human phenomenon has been almost completely overlooked by modem psychology. To explain why this situation has prevailed lies outside scope of this article. But with growth of scientific interest in individual flourishing and well-being, positive emotions including tears of joy are gaining their rightful attention by researchers.The literary viewJohann Wolfgang von Goethe was a precocious who learned Greek, Latin, French and Italian by age of eight. But it was not until his mid-twenties that he astonished Western literary world with appearance of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in 1774 (Goethe, 1774/2009). Written as a quasi-autobiography, it vividly portrayed its romantic hero as prone to outbursts of crying in his passion for life.Oh, if only I could fall on your neck and describe with a thousand joyous tears all emotions that are storming in my heart, Werther writes exuberantly about his romantic ardor for Lotte to his friend Wilhelm. Lotte allows Werther the comfort of crying {his} eyes out over her hand, and as he recounts such amorous scenes to Wilhelm, Werther again begins weeping like a child in recalling his romantic bliss.Goethe's fascination with tears of joy inspired later European and American writers, including luminaries like William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens in England, and masterful Edgar Allen Poe in United States. In an intriguing essay called The Poetic Principle, Poe (1850/2012) affirmed that aesthetics-specifically, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, and especially music, all possess formidable power to make people cry. But what causes this phenomenon? In Poe's view, our sense of beautiful is not only innate, but linked vitally to human longing for transcendent:When by poetry or music we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then.. .not excess of pleasure, but from our inability to grasp those divine and rapturous joys of which poetry or music gives us only brief and indeterminate glimpses. That is, Poe was suggesting that aesthetics, particularly music, gives us a heightened awareness of gap between most wondrous dimensions of human experience and our mundane daily life, and that this awareness causes us to cry.Of course, literary references to tears of joy date much earlier than Goethe. The Mahabharata, Sanskrit epic of ancient India, recounts how Pritha heard such grateful voices bom aloft unto sky, milk of love suffused her bosom, tear of joy was in her eye. (Mahabharata, 1899/2013). In The Illiad, Greek poet Homer nearly 3,000 years ago depicted Odysseus as crying in pleasure when bard Demodocus recounts story of Trojan horse, despite Odysseus' pain in remembering lost comrades and lost time. Later, first-century Greek elegists like Virgil and Propertius celebrated tears as signs of romantic fervor that could bring lovers close together. In Hebrew Bible, tears of joy appear in a variety of narratives, such as when Joseph dreamer is reunited with his beloved brother Benjamin after many years, and when ancient Hebrews, released from Babylonian captivity, witness rebuilding of their sacred temple in Jerusalem. …