The stars as if knowing that no one could see them now, frolicked in the black sky. Now flaring up, now going out, now quivering, they busily whispered among themselves about something joyful but mysterious.
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace (1869)
He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
William Blake. “Eternity” (1790s)
The great English poet William Blake advised us to kiss “the joy as it flies.” For joy is indeed transitory and we should catch it while we can. Our Joyful Dino motto includes this line: “Joy is how we fight back.” Let’s keep in mind how hope and longing inspire our ability to act to change the world. We act because we long for a better future. And imagining what that will look like is part of what keeps us going. Why shouldn’t we imagine that our Joyful Dinos energy is active throughout history? Here is one possible instance…
Let’s imagine the Joyful Dinos in the whispers of Tolstoy’s frolicking stars — “something joyful but mysterious”? Or is my desire to find an origin story here for the Joyful Dinos merely wish fulfillment? Leo Tolstoy’s remarkable historical novel War and Peace was published in 1869. It is the story of Russia’s war against Napoleon’s 1812 invasion. And it was originally published in serial form from 1865-1867.
Is our connecting of the dots, spots of light in the night sky, merely a result of our desire to root out the first glimmerings of the lost early lives of the Joyful Dinos?
I am rooting for the stars! What do you think?
Photograph by reader Susan Ardill, Sydney, Australia. 10 Aug 2026. From Leo Tolstoy. War & Peace. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage Classic Russians Series, 2017.
What is written in the stars? Rooted in longing and desire? Look to language to teach us in this short history…
Consider this: Desire is rooted in desiderare – to be away from the stars – a longing. And note that “consider” is rooted in con-siderare – to be with the stars. The Latin root was established in the 13th century after the Norman invasion of England. An etymological dictionary reveals the following.
Consider is a 14th century import to the language that has meant “to think about carefully” since its earliest days. It’s taken on other meanings over the years, but its original meaning is still its primary one. Like desire, it dates to the era known as Middle English, the time when English was taking on many words from Latin thanks to the Anglo-French spoken by the invaders of Norman Conquest fame. To desire something has, since the 13th century, meant to long or hope for something. Over the centuries the verb desire has developed other related meanings as well, but it’s this original meaning that’s most often called into service: the lover desires the beloved; the cat desires the mouse. The noun desire arrived about a century after the verb to occupy the same basic semantic territory. In its most common use, the noun desire is about the feeling of longing or hoping, or about the thing so longed for: the lover’s desire for the beloved; the object of love that is the heart’s desire.
The Latin forebears of consider and desire have a stronger family resemblance than their English descendants do. Consider is from consīderāre, meaning “to observe, think about.” Desire is from dēsīderāre, meaning “to long for, miss, desire.” Both are bipartite, with prefixes that have familiar English analogues: con- means “with, together, jointly,” and de- means “from, down, away.” Both word’s remaining syllables trace to Latin sīder- or sīdus, which is where things get a bit more complicated.
