Metaphysical Joy and Sadness

There is a rare form of joy that some of us have experienced, a joy that suggests that at the back of this life is something marvellous and that one day this life may open out onto it.  It goes together with a kind of sadness, call it metaphysical nostalgia, a sort of longing for a lost homeland, so far back in time that it is outside of time. This is the joy that C. S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy, and that Nietzsche may have had in mind when he had his Zarathustra exclaim, "All joy wants eternity, deep, deep eternity!"