The posthumous essay - The great psychiatrist offers texts taken from the classics on a reality that, unlike happiness, the market cannot sell us. Because it is consumed as it is generated
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 04/09/2025
Happiness is the new promise of the market economy. The day before yesterday it promised us bread, yesterday well-being, today happiness. It promises it to us in many ways, most recently with artificial intelligence, which, by finally doing better than us at everything we don't like and new things we don't yet do, will give us perfect happiness. A happiness that has to do with having, with comfort, with freedom of choice, with growth, with ‘more’, and often borders on fun and pleasure.
What the market cannot sell us or give us is the Joy that Eugenio Borgna talks about in a beautiful essay (Einaudi, 144 pages, €13.00). It is not an academic essay, but resembles a notebook, a travel diary, a collection of scattered thoughts, united by the theme of joy. Joy is not happiness, because joy happens in the present, it is an experience, while happiness (or unhappiness) is a more stable condition. Nor is it gladness, even if Borgna does not tell us why, but we can guess by thinking of the perfect gladness of Francis, of the etymology of the word, which refers to manure (“laetus”).
Providence has placed joy among the essential resources for living. However, it has hidden it in small, tiny things, almost invisible if we rush too much. And perhaps for this reason, the poor and pure of heart are able to grasp it, perhaps only them. It is part of the landscape of that Kingdom of Heaven where all the poor and pure of heart dwell, sometimes without knowing it. Sometimes it comes after great pain, depression, and bereavement, and its arrival is the sentinel that announces the dawn. It is grace, only grace, all gift. We can buy some kinds of happiness, but not the joy of living. That is pure gratuity, and it is the most beautiful. Other times it comes during a different kind of prayer, accompanied by tears.
Let's say right away that it is not easy, even for a significant and excellent author such as Borgna (1930-2024), to write a book composed mainly of quotations from many of the greatest poets, writers, and philosophers of all time. Because it is difficult for anyone to alternate their own thoughts with the infinite thoughts of Rilke, Leopardi, Nietzsche, or Simone Weil. But perhaps Borgna's intention or animus was precisely to give us, at the end of his life (which once would have been considered long), the most beautiful words and texts on joy that he encountered in the course of his life and that of many others, especially in the practice of his profession as a psychiatrist. However, set among the words of the classics, some of Borgna's reflections on joy are also important and beautiful, touching on the beauty of his quotations, such as this one found at the beginning of the essay: “The time of hope is the future, as is that of waiting; the time of nostalgia and sadness is the past; the time of joy is the present, fragile and luminous.” Joy happens now, joy does not accumulate, we are no longer capable of joy tomorrow because we felt it today or yesterday; indeed, sometimes a long famine of joy prepares us for a sublime and unique joy. It is ‘consumed’ as it is generated. It is as ephemeral as a butterfly, but in that brief flight it releases all its infinite beauty. Again: “In joy, there are no longer the dimensions of the past and the future, worries and fears, nostalgia and anxieties; we live in the present, in the burning instant of a present that expands and restores meaning to life.”
But Borgna's most original and evocative pages are those related to his work, in particular his strong invitation to cherish the fragile joy in others (and in ourselves) also and because it is ephemeral and transitory: "Each of us has the task of tracing the traces of joy in the faces, eyes, gazes, and smiles of the people we meet, avoiding extinguishing it with our inattention and indifference. So when a few drops, a few sparks of joy are reborn in a patient, we cannot help but feel called to glimpse the dawn of hope." This is truly a beautiful passage. He adds: "As I come to the end of this book, I cannot help but say that when, in psychiatry, but also in medicine, we meet a person, young or old, immersed in joy, and in whom there are symptoms of illness, we should do everything we can not to hurt that joy by rigidly adhering to the slogan of telling the whole truth to the sick person. Joy is too precious a gift not to be held close to the heart and welcomed in its inner light and lightness, in its levity and fragility: in its silence and grace." These are words in which all his art and professional wisdom has blossomed into wisdom and poetry. From time to time, Borgna enters into dialogue with some Christian authors, from Teresa of Avila to Pope Francis (with whom he closes the book), as if to make us want to ask ourselves: but what is the typical mark of Christian joy? He does not answer, but invites us to seek it and perhaps find it in the joy of children, whom Jesus often points to in the Gospels as models of faith, and invites us to be like them in order to enter the Kingdom. There must therefore be something special about the joy of children in relation to that of the Gospel. It is truly all and only grace. Children experience life simply by living, no matter what they do. They rejoice even when they fall asleep anywhere—children's sleep is a heritage of humanity. Childhood is the age of perfect joy, because children have only the present, and in the present they encounter it. That is why contact with children is essential for everyone's joy.
Joy becomes more complicated as adults and then as old people, because we feel life slipping away and, in order not to lose it, we think we can stop it by capturing and devouring it—and joy does not come. Fun, aperitifs, restaurants, cruises, vacations pursued all year round. We eat up life, devour people and everything we encounter for a joy that does not come. But even in old age, joy is possible. However, it is very similar to the joy possible for Sisyphus who, having reached the top of yet another climb pushing his eternal boulder, in the brief pause between the end of the ascent and the beginning of the new descent, in that fleeting breath can experience a paradoxical but true joy: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy” (A. Camus). At other times, it is the boulder that generates an equally paradoxical joy, when life has taken away all the reasons for yesterday's joys and happiness and we go on only because life imposes its intrinsic discipline: preparing breakfast, going out for bread, carefully setting the table even if we are alone and there is no longer a companion. It is the boulder of life that drives us and, suddenly, can give us a delicate and true joy, which sneaks in between the dishes and the broom. I leave the last word to Borgna, thanking him: “We should never hurt the joy of a person who entrusts themselves to our care.”
Photo credits: Photo by Arina Krasnikova on Pexels
