I saw Pixar's Inside Out a few weeks ago at the Pinecrest Amphitheater, an outdoor movie theater on the shore of Pinecrest Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Under the stars, surrounded by family and with the smells of pine and campfires in the air, the setting was beautiful and memorable. Fitting for a movie about the mystery, joy and sadness of memory.

A few weeks ago I read Zadie Smith’s essay, “Joy,” in the New York Review of Books. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend doing so. It’s a beautifully written, decidedly contemporary reflection on joy with a tone I suspect Millennial and Gen-X readers will particularly resonate with.

For me, Lewis's sentiments about longing and Joy ring ever so true. The words of Psyche in Till We Have Faces describe exactly how I feel sometimes when that peculiar blend of happiness, memory, and "there must be more of it" longing combine to make me feel, deeply, that there exists a greater, truer, more perfect reality for which we were all originally created.