In a 1965 Reader’s Digest article, “Overtaken by Joy,” Ardis Whitman recounts sitting on a train beside an elderly gentleman who was staring out the window at the passing landscape. Both commented on its beauty, and then he called Whitman’s attention to a hay wagon they were passing, “as if there could be no greater event in all the world.” When Whitman gave him a puzzled look, the man said: “You think it’s strange that just a hay wagon means so much. But you see, last week the doctor told me that I have only three months to live. Ever since, everything has looked so beautiful, so important to me. You can’t imagine how beautiful! I feel as if I had been asleep and had only just waked up!”
At the end of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” when Ebenezer Scrooge awakes from his final nightmare and realizes he still has the time and means to redeem himself, we see the full-blown ecstasy of such a moment. “‘I don’t know what to do!’ cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath. … ‘I am light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy, I am as giddy as a drunken man!’”
