somewhere in all of this is beauty

james clavell's king rat, if you haven't read it, is a story set in a malayan prison camp during the japanese occupation of wwii. much is made in the book of food and cigarettes, in particular how much eggs were prized among the inmates:

The King was pleased. "You wait till I finish. Then you'll see the goddamnest egg you've ever seen." He powdered the eggs with pepper, then added the salt.

-- which leads to Marlowe being

...pacified by the glory of the sizzling eggs.

this goes on for some pages. later on, the men trade in eggs, argue about them, accuse each other of stealing them, and so forth. ok.

in victor frankl's books about his experiences in the concentration camp, he often says things like this:

We were grateful for the smallest of mercies. We were glad when there was time to delouse before going to bed, although in itself this was no pleasure, as it meant standing naked in an unheated hut where icicles hung from the ceiling. But we were thankful if there was no air raid alarm during this operation and the lights were not switched off. If we could not do the job properly, we were kept awake half the night.

similar quotes have to do with the joy of having extra potatoes, or looking up from time to time into a clear sky.

so you could go on looking for examples all day, but my point is that the extraction of exquisite pleasure from the utterly mundane is something that's been written about a lot, and something that i'm sure most people experience at some point in their lives (particularly if you went through ns, but i'll spare you those recollections).

now take that feeling a little bit further, and remove as a necessary quality its positive valence. remove also the necessity for it to have any specific proximal cause. now what you're left with is something like c.s. lewis' Joy, a feeling desired, but not necessarily pleasurable, an underwelling, a spiritual sensation, a notion that beneath the surface characteristics of the mundane is something infinitely powerful.

so, it may just be that i've been smoking crack, but the more i read and talk to people, the more i sense that this is a very common human experience, though one that is incredibly hard to put into words. maybe it's a zen thing, that it defies description because the notion gets more slippery as you try harder to verbalize what it is. in any case, it's (to me) one of the big psychological mysteries. what is that feeling? is it religious? is that what people mean when they say they're experiencing 'God' (the honest ones, not the fruitcakes). is it something that emerges because of our cognitive biases to categorize things and draw connections? and, in the frame of your choice, is it important, or just a feeling like any other?