Humanity: An Emotional History

A better day will come, or might come, while the bad ones steal by in the interim. In these spaces, we feel time's elasticity as acutely as one who, alone in the house in the late evening, awaits the return of his beloved, in a state in which all other spiritual activity has ceased. He is, as the Chinese say, 'looking at the door', trusting that soon the key will grate in the lock, the handle turn, an the waiting, which can now be forgotten, be at an end. The power that radiates from this moment illuminates for a time the whole perceptual world. It recompenses the the one who waited with the news that the waiting wasn't in vain, and it exercises its own untriumphal victory over the other emotions. A world glistening with joy is a world that can easily do without fear, without anger, disgust and jealousy, and a world that can do without these is a world worth living in.

Stuart Walton, Humanity: An Emotional History, 2004.