Matthew Dowd, a former Democrat at the heart of President Bush's re-election campaign, has a favorite quotation from Yeats taped to his office wall: "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy".
"The wounds of your forgetting will be temporary, but the joy and wisdom will be yours forever.
"Being Irish," he wrote, "he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy".
So it's a happy ending for now, but in the world of the Gallaghers, happy endings are only temporary moments of joy in their otherwise chaotic and stressful lives.
The joy was temporary, however.
Saturday brought Perla Martinez three minutes of joy, a temporary pause in a long, painful separation.
But, I also write this knowing all of these feelings are temporary, but the incredible joy my children bring is not.
A good club night is a communal sharing of collective joy, a temporary negation of the backbreaking drudgery and life-sapping boredom of work that leaves most of us feeling like we exist rather than live.
Two examples of temporary blockages to the joy of effort are mental exhaustion from overexertion and blockages arising as a result of dysfunctional patterns of thought and behavior that have not been completely eradicated.
