 When all of this is going on, he held his hands up as though to imply war, famine, people all over the world in cages or concentration camps, some of them children, disease, sorrow immense and imperturbable, it only getting worse and worse and worse. Dude had big hands. Why would you write about joy? The implication, of course, is that joy does not have anything to do with everything in that guy's big hands. It's a kid's fantasy.