From the book
Centuries of Meditations
Thomas Traherne · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordTo enjoy is to possess or have the use of a good with conscious delight.
- In TraherneThe great sequence beginning “Your enjoyment … is never right” makes the term a standard by which ordinary life is judged.
- In this editionDo not reduce the word either to legal ownership or to a passing pleasant sensation.
- A place to beginRight enjoyment gives common created things a value beyond a royal treasury.
Meaning
To enjoy is to possess or have the use of a good with conscious delight. The word retains a stronger relation to possession and participation than a modern phrase such as “having fun” usually conveys. In Traherne, it often names the activity through which an already-given world becomes truly one’s own.
Use in the book
The great sequence beginning “Your enjoyment … is never right” makes the term a standard by which ordinary life is judged. The world is not properly enjoyed merely because its materials are available or its pleasures occasionally agreeable. The reader must apprehend a divine gift, recognise its worth, and respond with a breadth proportionate to it. Even the common dust can be a greater treasure than accumulated money once reason sees what infancy once apprehended without calculation.
This possession is strikingly non-exclusive. The reader is to perceive himself as sole heir, while discovering that everyone else is also a sole heir. Other persons therefore increase rather than diminish the inheritance. Their happiness must be desired with a zeal answering one’s own; otherwise the claim to enjoy the whole world remains false. The language of inwardly containing seas, skies, ages, and kingdoms is an enlargement of concern, not a warrant for taking away another person’s goods.
Enjoyment also changes the enjoyer. In knowing objects the soul discovers and exercises its own powers; its apparent emptiness is filled with meaningful forms and relations. The world does not merely stand outside as entertainment. It becomes present within understanding and affection, and the soul becomes beautiful through what it rightly receives. This explains why mere possession, bare information, and sensation without love cannot suffice.
Finally, enjoyment is a task of liberty. Gifts may be objectively present and still be refused or neglected. No abundance can compel a creature to prize it. The book’s insistence on gratitude, study, recollection, and love therefore follows from its account of enjoyment rather than interrupting it. To receive well is already an important action, and the mature enjoyer in turn becomes an object of enjoyment to God and other souls.
Places to read
- I.25Right enjoyment gives common created things a value beyond a royal treasury.
- I.29Each sole heir’s inheritance is enlarged by the presence of other sole heirs.
- I.30Enjoyment requires a concern for others’ happiness equal to one’s own.
- II.78Objects reveal, exercise, and transform the powers of the soul.
- IV.48The recipient’s free love and esteem determine whether divine gifts are actually enjoyed.
In this edition
Do not reduce the word either to legal ownership or to a passing pleasant sensation. It often gathers knowledge, love, use, gratitude, and delighted possession into one activity. “Fruition” overlaps with it, but individual contexts may stress realised participation more strongly.