In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Adultjoy The slender vessel used for weddings was also used for funerals. Loutrophoros. Handles curled like rams' horns, and beneath some rigid frills, the ghost-bride greets the master of the underworld. Are terra-cotta slaves running around with stylized gestures on the back of the vase? Nothing is obvious but that the bride is confused. What was to be joy is not continuing. Jagged lightning designs. Death greets her like a senator. I sat last night in a cheap cafe leaning on the dignity of a smalltable. Worn carpet with an eighteenth century pattern. And all around the room, bent over silver paperbacks, eating and being filled, others like myself, one writing a treatise on a napkin . . . How did this sudden joy come in? Joy by subtraction, joy in the dim human realm . . . I thought of Wordsworth's formal joy fading in fourteen lines commending him to death or Herbert's childlike adjunct to renunciation . . . No, it was the little adult joy he'd raised in me, pure, like the tube of space-time after an accident: the worst has alreadyhappened! I flattened the book; the plate of splendid vegetablesarrived, healthy food for the readers zo of Berkeley whose faces glow but not perfectly . . . The owner slouched behind the counter, selling his jars of night. And under a grate on Center, an iron ladder greeted the revised hell where the pool shimmered, filled the space that would transform the wedding. The deathbride adjusts her tiara . . . Freud walks to the desk; his favorite statue, bronze Athena, has lost her spear. We grow up. Joy becomes the missing event, what reaches us unknown without wisdom. Joy is the spear. 2.1 ...

Share