Delight is an orphan. Many other moods and emotions have had champions in literature and philosophy, patrons invested in their cultural standing. Melancholy can claim The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s strange masterpiece from 1621. It generated a fashion for melancholy that has not entirely faded, which the Romantics powerfully refreshed, lionizing melancholy for its immediate purchase on beauty. Baudelaire liked to remark that sadness is an essential element of beauty. In Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain and other albums, Miles Davis projected modern melancholy onto a liquid music that proves Baudelaire’s point. Joy is, in this respect, like melancholy: it has great advocates in art and perhaps the greatest musical advocate of all in Beethoven, who composed the “Ode to Joy” — via Schiller’s poem, which Beethoven embedded in his ninth symphony — regal and radiant. Despair and anguish have secure homes in the arts and in letters. They haunt the literature of loss, the literature of mortality, the literature of romance, the literature of regret, the literature of war. Happiness? It is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right, or at least the pursuit of it is. Stendhal believed the exact opposite of Baudelaire — that happiness is what beauty promises. And happiness can be formidable in absentia. It, too, cuts a culturally imposing figure. Horror is widely esteemed. What else could answer the human talent for cruelty? Horror intertwines with history — with Josephus chronicling the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem or Thucydides relating his stories of plague and brutality or Gibbon summing up history itself as a record of the “crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” In the twentieth century, the Holocaust and other shatteringly large mass murders have deepened history’s association with atrocity and crime, leaving its shadow on the face of literature. The literature of witness has many twentieth-century tributaries. It is paradigmatically modern, an entire genre governed by horror. Or horror can flourish outside the historical realm, in the psyche. It can be the ahistorical preoccupation of Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Edvard Munch, Val Lewton, and Alfred Hitchcock. No video streaming service would be complete without an expanding collection of horror movies. Hollywood discovered a long time ago that even horror can give pleasure. The more irate moods balance political with cultural stature. Raging against the dying of the light can resemble rage at the world’s injustices — the purity of political anger and the indignation that bends toward revolution. Karl Marx did not just study global commerce and speculate about alternative forms of political economy; a virtuoso of invective, he grounded his prophetic visions in fury. The dominant political mode in the United States at the moment is either anger or disgust, a point of convergence for the wrathful Right and the wrathful Left. Disgust is a mark of engagement and sensibility. Not to be disgusted is to be oblivious or simply to be stupid. For decades, disgust has colored contemporary art, which often confronts us with the extent of our rapacity, with the depth of our prejudice, and with our underlying commitment to the production not of value or of dignity but of garbage, of the waste we so callously leave behind. Disgust is definitely in vogue. But delight is not in vogue. It almost never is. It is, as I say, an intellectual orphan. More fickle than happiness and almost physiological, a reflex as much as an emotion, delight evades easy definition. It is intensely subjective, more so perhaps than sadness or anger. It is lighter, and with fewer evident implications, and even more impermanent, than pleasure. Delight cannot be summoned. It comes when it comes and goes when it goes — usually quickly. It awaits occasions, and in their absence it cannot be spontaneously generated. Often delight owes something to surprise. Yet delight is not a less meaningful state of mind, a less fundamental human mode, than sadness or anger, rage or disgust, joy or melancholy. But where are its advocates? Its placelessness puts it in a precarious cultural position. It runs the risk of being overlooked and, by getting overlooked, of being dismissed or forgotten as trivial. It runs the risk of neglect at precisely the moment when delight might be most culturally beneficial, which is to say the moment we are living in right now. Slaves of anxiety and fear, surrounded by unimpeachable reasons for pessimism, we are still in need of it. I would like to say a few words in defense of delight. 
Delight is a Latinate word. The “de” is an intensifier placed against lactare, to lure or to entice. Old French modified delactare into delitier, meaning to please or to charm, and around the year 1200 Middle English winnowed delit from delitier, keeping its meaning. In the sixteenth century, delit acquired an “h” and with this addition its modern form, which by an accident of English spelling harbors a word that does not really belong to it — light. A room is lit, a lamp can be lighted, and a person can be delighted. Words properly related to delight are: delicious, delicate, lace, elicit, and dilettante. (A dilettante, unlike an expert, is someone who is often delighted.) The root of delight in lactare reinforces one of delight’s important aspects. It is an active emotion, kinetic in a way that anger and sadness are not. Compared to delight, anger and sadness can seem static. The 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary provides three definitions of delight, wavering between sense and intellect. First, it is “a high degree of gratification of mind; a high-wrought state of pleasurable feeling; lively pleasure; extreme satisfaction; joy.” “Gratification of mind” is itself an interesting variation on “extreme satisfaction.” “Lively pleasures” emphasize delight as a word of motion, more active than passive. Somewhat circular is Webster’s second definition: “that which gives great pleasure or delight.” And third, lest “gratification of mind” grant too much to mind and to highly wrought inner states, there is
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence