Treasury of Joy & Inspiration

A READER'S DIGEST BOOK

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Contents

Introduction

Joy

Overtaken by Joy
by Ardis Whitman

Shall We Dance?
by Neil Simon

The Bottom Line on Happiness
by Clayton M. Christensen

Obey That Impulse
by William Moulton Marston

In Search of Heaven
by Gail Cameron Wescott

Gilligan's Aisle
by Jeanne Marie Laskas

Miracles

The Gold-and-Ivory Tablecloth
by Rev. Howard C. Schade

A Dog Like No Other
by Peter Muilenburg

“A Man Don't Know What He Can Do”
by Elise Miller Davis

The Forked-Stick Phenomenon
by Emily and Per Ola d'Aulaire

Letter in the Wallet
by Arnold Fine

Gratitude

Christopher Reeve's Decision
by Christopher Reeve

“Information Please”
by Paul Villiard

The Dream Horse and the Dining-Room Table
by Billy Porterfield

His Gift of the Future
by Marc Lerner

A Heart for the Run
by Gary Paulsen

The Gratitude Club
by Steve Hartman

Giving

The Christmas Present
by James A. Michener

The Man on the Train
by Alex Haley

Ferragamo's Gift
by Susan Shreve

Letting Go
by Litty Mathew

She Gave Her Father Life
by Henry Hurt

Holidays

A Family for Freddie
by Abbie Blair

A String of Blue Beads
by Fulton Oursler

Night of Hope and Possibility
by Roxanne Willems Snopek

The Holiday I'll Never Forget
by Rick Bragg, Esmeralda Santiago, Melissa Fay Greene, Tayari Jones, Floyd Skloot, Lee Smith and Jenny Allen

Christmas Out of Season
by Robert Fulghum

Healing

A Love Like No Other
by Skip Hollandsworth

Two Words to Avoid, Two to Remember
by Arthur Gordon

The Day My Silent Brother Spoke
by Jim Watson

The Ugliest Cat in the World
by Penny Porter

My Fourteenth Summer
by W. W. Meade

Mother Courage
by Linda Kramer Jenning

Heroes

An Open Letter to Students
by Dwight D. Eisenhower

Three Days to See
by Helen Keller

How America Can Make Brotherhood Work
by Bill Bradley

The Night I Met Einstein
by Jerome Weidman

My Father and Me
by Billy Crystal

 

Credits and Acknowledgements

Introduction

by Liz Vaccariello, Editor-in-Chief

H
ow do
you distill 90 years of beloved articles (shelves and shelves of bound editions housed in a mansion-like library) into a single sparkling volume that you can hold in your palm?

When we decided to celebrate our 90th anniversary by publishing a book of our best stories, it felt like trying to squeeze the Colorado River into a bottle of Coke. Then I reframed the question: How does the brand that made its name by “curating and condensing” the best reads in the land curate and condense itself?

Because that is one skill that
Reader's Digest
editors have shared across generations and decades and anniversaries: the ability to select those stories that are so moving, so evocative, so honest, and so bold that they change your perspective on life. That vision, brought to life in 1922 by founders Dewitt and Lila Wallace, is the mission we still carry on today. And we have the unique privilege of acting on the feeling that such stories inspire:
Everyone should read this. This story must be shared.

So I'm indebted to this team of editors who spent weekends and late nights reading through our archives to select the best of
Reader's Digest
—these “reads of lasting interest.” Many selections moved us to tears; others made us laugh until we forgot our worries. Some are written by the thought leaders of their time—such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, who expresses in a way that no one else can why all students should go to college. Others celebrate the indelible mark left by longtime contributors such as Alex Haley, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
Roots,
and Fulton Oursler, a prolific author and senior editor of
Reader's Digest
from 1944 to 1952. Inside you'll find famous and not-so-famous names, selected and reprinted from newspapers, magazines, books, radio broadcasts, and television specials.

The media we curate from have changed, but the nature of our choices has not. Our selections evoke what we call the extraordinary ordinary: the bond of family, the gift that can change a life, the love of a pet, the quiet coincidences that can be directed only by a divine hand.

The editors who participated in this project told me they felt changed after reading through their trove of
Reader's Digest
articles. Because that's the power of a great story: It lifts our spirits, teaches us something new, connects us to our community, and inspires us with ideas about who we might become. It's my sincere wish that you experience the same feeling from reading this
Reader's Digest
treasury.

Overtaken by Joy

By Ardis Whitman

April 1965

I
t was
a day in late June, gray and depressing, with clouds hanging low. My husband and I were driving to Nova Scotia, Canada, for a much needed vacation, both of us more tired than we cared to admit. We traveled glumly, hoping to reach rest and dinner before the rain came. Suddenly, on a lonely stretch of highway flanked by woods, the storm struck. The forest vanished in a great deluge. Cascades of water shut us in, making driving impossible. We pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and stopped.

Then, as though someone had turned off a celestial faucet, it ended. A thin radiance, like a spray of gold, spread out from the clouds, catching the top of the trees. Every blade of grass was crystalline as the sun flashed on trembling drops. The very road shone. And then a rainbow arched across the sky. But more than that: on our right was a pond, and in the pond was the end of the rainbow! It was as though this arch of living color had been built for us alone. We could hardly speak for awe and joy.

A friend of mine has described a similar experience. She had walked out on a lonely beach at twilight. It was a time of grief for her, and loneliness was what she wanted. Offshore, across the darkening sea, was a single low island. Presently she was aware of a dim light moving on the island, and then came the splash of oars and the scrape of a boat leaving the shore. She made out the outlines of a fishing boat, and in it the figure of a man. He rowed a little way and anchored. My friend told me that, after a while, she felt an intense and glowing sense of oneness with that silent figure. It was as though sea and sky and night and those two solitary human beings were united in a kind of profound identity. “I was overtaken by joy,” she said.

Most of
us have experienced such lighted moments, when we seem to understand ourselves and the world and, for a single instant, know the loveliness of living beings. But these moments vanish quickly, and we are almost embarrassed to admit that they have ever been, as though in doing so we betray a willingness to believe in what is not true.

However, psychologist Abraham Maslow of Brandeis University embarked some years ago on a study of average, healthy individuals and found that a great many report such experiences—“moments of great awe; moments of the most intense happiness or even rapture, ecstasy or bliss.” He has concluded that these experiences are often the expression of buoyant health.

In his files, for example, is the story of a young mother. Getting breakfast for her family, she hurried about the kitchen pouring orange juice and coffee, spreading jam on toast. The children were chattering; the sun streamed in on their faces; her husband was playing with the littlest one. All was usual. But as she looked at them, she was suddenly so overcome by how much she loved them, by her feelings of good fortune, that she could scarcely speak for joy.

Here, too, is the story of a man who remembers a day when he went swimming alone and recalls “the crazy, childish joy with which he cavorted in the water like a fish.” He was so overwhelmed by his great happiness at being “so perfectly physical” that he shouted again and again with joy.

Apparently almost anything may serve as the impetus of such joy—starshine on new snow; a sudden field of daffodils; a moment in marriage when hand reaches out to hand in the realization that this other person speaks as you speak, feels as you feel. Joy may wait, too, just beyond danger when you have enough to face a situation and live it out. It may come from such a simple thing as waking in the night on a train as it pulls into a station, hearing voices calling to one another out of the darkness, seeing a face smiling warmly in the light of the trainman's lantern. Whatever the source, such experiences provide the most memorable moments of human life.

Joy is much more than happiness. It is “exultation of spirit,” says the dictionary, “gladness; delight; a state of felicity.” Awe and a sense of mystery are part of it; so are the feelings of humility and gratitude. Suddenly we are keenly aware of every living thing—every leaf, every flower, every cloud, the mayfly hovering over the pond, the crow cawing in the treetop. “O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!” cried the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in such a moment.

Enthralled, we see as we never saw before. The most important thing in these peak experiences, says Professor Maslow, is the feeling of these people that they had really glimpsed “the essence of things, the secret of life, as if veils had been pulled aside.”

We see, too, the unity of things—a dazzling vision of the kinship we all have with one another and with the universal life around us. Everyone who has ever had such a moment has noted this quality of “melting into.” There is a feeling that life is a whole; I and my world are part of each other; I and all life are united in a bond of love and understanding. And we feel free to be ourselves. Suddenly we know who we are and what we are meant to be. All doubts, fears, inhibitions, tensions and weaknesses are left behind. This is our true self and we have found it.

“To miss the joy is to miss all,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. For these moments of joy are like flowers in the pastureland of living; or like a plough turning up the gasping earth in a dry and weed-bound field. Life grows larger, we draw deeper breaths, doors open softly within us. “Where there is joy, there is fulfillment,” wrote Paul Tillich in
The Meaning of Joy,
“and where there is fulfillment, there is joy.”

The sad
thing is that it happens to most of us so rarely. As we grow older, our lives become buried under the pressures of the workaday world. Joy is not likely to come to us when we are going round and round the tormenting circle of our own busyness, and our own importance.

What we need is the child's spontaneity and wonder of discovery. “To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,” wrote Walt Whitman. And English naturalist Richard Jefferies, desperately poor and fighting a deadly disease, could cry from his invalid's chair, “Every blade of grass was mine as if I had myself planted it. All the grasses were my pets: I loved them all. Every wild hawk that passed overhead was mine. What more beautiful than the sweep and curve of his going through the azure sky? Oh, happy, happy days! So beautiful to watch; and all mine!”

How can we restore to our lives this eager openness to all the world which is so often the prelude to joy? Sometimes all that is needed is a chance to see an old experience in a new way. I remember one such occasion. I had been working all night on a manuscript. It would not come right, and I felt I could never finish it. But as the clock struck five, the last sentence fell into place and I put down my pen, opened the door and stepped out into the lawn. The stars were thinning out and the sky in the east had that “light-is-coming” look. A few birds began to sing, tentatively trying out their voices, each seemingly waking the next. The trees, dark shapes on the horizon, began now to take on form and configuration. A streamer of light caught the weeping willow across the street and sharply etched one branch of our birch tree. The sky lightened all along the eastern horizon. More trees appeared, one by one. The great maples lighted with brilliance like candelabra in the dark.

The sun was up! There was a golden blaze behind the dark trees, a quickened freshness in the air. Twig by twig the sun set fire to every branch and leaf. The birds now were singing wildly as though they had just been created by the morning itself; and I, too, felt newly created, so full of joy that it seemed I could not hold it.

Most of us need to learn to break out of the prison of self. For joy comes not only from fusion with nature; it comes from love and creativeness; from insight and discovery and great emotion. Perhaps joy is most likely to come when we forget ourselves in service, or in the pursuit of a great dream. Florence Nightingale, working long, hard hours to become a nurse, could say “This is life! I wish for no other world than this!”

Handel wrote
his
Messiah
in a little more than three weeks. Working morning, noon and night, he hardly touched the food set before him. When he had finished Part Two, which contains the “Hallelujah Chorus,” he rushed to the window weeping with joy, and his servant heard him cry, “I did think I did see all heaven before me and the great God Himself!”

Most of all, joy may come when we do not run from life—from its sorrows, its struggles and its hopes. The person who wants above all to avoid risk and danger and sufferings sets out no welcome for the moments of joy.

When life's transiency and frailty are omnipresent, what we have grows sweeter. As G. K. Chesterton said, “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”

I remember finding myself seated beside an old gentleman on a train some years ago. He sat quietly looking out of the window. His eyes searched each leaf, each cloud, the lines of passing houses, the upturned faces of children watching the train go by.

“It is beautiful, isn't it?” I ventured at last, intrigued by his absorption.

“Yes,” he said, and no more for a moment. Then he smiled and waved a hand at a passing hay wagon. “See,” he said. “Hay going to the barn.” And he made it sound as though there could be no greater event in all the world than a wagonload of hay on its way to the mow.

He saw the unspoken question in my face. “You think it's strange,” he said, “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 woken up.”

Perhaps we
are more likely to experience a moment of joy if we can admit that there is more to life than we have yet fathomed; if we can acknowledge a world greater than our own. To be sure, the experience of joy is not necessarily religious in any conventional way. But a distinguishing characteristic of joy is the feeling people have that they have touched the hem of something far beyond themselves.

In my own life there was a moment of this special exaltation. En route by plane to the Midwest, we were flying at a high altitude, and a continent of shining clouds spread beneath us. Often, before and since, I have watched these radiant towers and hillocks of cloud go by. But this time the scene was haunted by a strange joy so penetrating that the plane seemed not to be there.

I thought of myself as living and walking in a land like that, and I, who is the most gregarious of humans, knew in a flash of deep illumination that there was in the universe a light, a stuff, a tissue, a substance in company with which one would never be lonely. The experience left the compelling certainty that we dwell safely in a universe far more personal, far more human, far more tender than we are.

What if these moments of joy are given to us to reveal that this is the way we are meant to live? What if the clarity of joy is the way we should be seeing all the time? To many people, it seems almost wicked to feel this radiance in a world threatened as ours is. But most generations have known uncertainty and challenge and peril. The more grievous the world, the more we need to remember the luminous beauty at the center of life. Our moments of joy are proof that at the heart of darkness an unquenchable light shines.

 

 

Shall We Dance?

By Neil Simon

September 1999

From
The Play Goes On