The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

Is this metaphorical bridge in the body of the parent? And if so, what are the provinces it connects? Or is it connecting the towns of terror and delight, which might make the dangling legs very high up belong to the mayors of terror and delight, both of whom look, I’m afraid to say, exactly like your child.

Here’s the ridiculous part. Is it possible that people come to us—I do not here aspire exactly to a metaphysical argument, and certainly not one about fate or god, but rather just a simple, spiritual question—and then go away from us— I don’t even want to write it. Rather this: And what comes through the hole?

“What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I get to know—everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything—lives with some profound personal sorrow.

Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

few bumblebees—is the name because they bumble? If so, it’s a misnomer, given these things crawl elegantly on the flower clusters, reminding me of Philippe Petit of Man on Wire fame, or, more sweetly, more to the point, a baby’s hand wrapping around my finger, which—right now, in my life, there is a child named Auri, whose hand wraps my finger when I put it in her little palm and she totters across the room, which is one of the delights.

If you get closer to the amaranth, you’ll notice in the lighter-colored flowers—the reddish, fiery pink sort of fading to a lavender—that the flowers are giving way to the seeds, of which, on every flower—the bees know this, the honey and ballerinas and the many I can’t see—by my estimation, there are a zillion. A zillion seeds on every flower, I’m saying. Maybe one hundred flowers. Meaning, check my math here, one hundred zillion seeds. Meaning, keep your calculators out, one hundred zillion future plants, on every one of which how many flowers, how many seeds (some of which are now in a paper bag in my pocket, thank you very much). This is what I think exponential growth actually means. This is why I study gratitude. Or what I mean when I say it. From a crack in the street.

By which, it’s really a kind of miracle, was expressed a social and bodily intimacy—on this airplane, at this moment in history, our particular bodies, making the social contract of mostly not touching each other irrelevant, or, rather, writing a brief addendum that acknowledges the official American policy, which is a kind of de facto and terrible touching of some of us, or trying to, always figuring out ways to keep touching us—and this flight attendant, tap tap, reminding me, like that, simply, remember, tap tap, how else we might be touched, and are, there you go, man.

and for some reason I wish to deploy the verb drowning, which, in addition to being a cliché, implies a particular kind of death, and I will follow the current of that verb to suggest that the flower kissing, the moving so close to another living and breathing thing’s breath, which in this case is that of the lily I planted six years ago, will in fact kill you with delight, will annihilate you with delight, will end the life you had previously led before kneeling here and breathing the breathing thing’s breath, and the lily will resurrect you, too, your lips and nose lit with gold dust, your face and fingers smelling faintly all day of where they’ve been, amen.

Yes, it’s the lack of necessity of this act that’s perhaps precisely why it delights me so. Everything that needs doing—getting the groceries or laundry home—would get done just fine without this meager collaboration. But the only thing that needs doing, without it, would not.

“Good morning, Jersey City family!”—and so lowered his umbrella and walked quickly out, with a smirk that today I read as a smirk of gentleness, of self-forgiveness.

Do you ever think of yourself, late to your meeting or peed your pants some or sent the private e-mail to the group or burned the soup or ordered your cortado with your fly down or snot on your face or opened your umbrella in the bakery, as the cutest little thing?

I could feel him shaking at the enormity of the gathering, at which a bunch of mommies gathered around the child on my shoulders to care for him, looking up: “You’ll be okay” and “We’ll find your mommy, don’t worry” and “Do you need a hug?” None of which prevented this kid from sobbing at how many mommies we were, how tiny he was in the midst of this mass of mommies, who quite spontaneously erupted into the chant FIND HIS MOM! FIND HIS MOM! which brought his mother forth—There you are!—everyone weeping at their reunion, the boy hopping from my shoulders and into his mother’s arms, where they held each other for several seconds, the boy wrapping his legs and arms around his mom, his mom putting her hand on the back of his head, their faces pushed into each other’s necks, holding each other, the way we do.

He spoke a language I didn’t understand, but the sounds he was making to this baby, which, with his traveling companions, became a chorus of sounds, made me wonder if baby talk is a universal or universalish language, for I understood exactly what they were saying, and how nice of god to make this exception around the language adults speak to babies. Anyhow, the man was so enchanted with this petite creature with wisps of hair feathering north and big eyes that he couldn’t resist first poking the child’s tummy before scooping the squirt onto his knee, where she stood, bouncing and grinning, looking back to her mom, who looked a touch nervous, before being set free and retreating back down the aisle, and returning again, upon which the choir of babbling would commence, everyone reaching toward the munchkin (picture the halftime show at a basketball game when the mascot bazookas T-shirts into the crowd), scooping her up, and again, and again, until I was so flabbergasted by the endurance of love and delight incited by this child to whom I presume none of these people was related, a love and delight that seemed analogous to the one that makes some people struggle not to eat the faces of babies, that I found myself, despite the very engrossing book I was reading about something horrible, laughing out loud and babbling with them and convinced again of something deeply good in us.

Which delight landed in my lap from the open window of a passing car, and is simply (although the plaintive synth chords and watery triplets betray somewhat the simplicity) an argument for the sunshine, which, true, maybe I am the choir, but I like the argument for its simplicity, which is that everybody loves it, and everybody loves it, and folks get brown in it, and folks get down in it, and most convincingly to me, and that which elevates it to the metaphysical, even the holy: just bees and things and flowers.

To be clear, my efforts at the jenky are modest compared to my folks’, from whom I learned it in part, probably to their upwardly mobile chagrin. Which is a good place to say the plain, which is that jenky is a classed designation. It often implies a degree of judgment, often by people still haunted by and sprinting from the tendrils of poverty, about broke people. About broke people things. I am no longer a broke person, and so you would be right to read my affinity for the jenk complicatedly, with a nod to privilege and inheritance both.

Though translation is an act of love, so my showerers needn’t be disappointed at all.

Before boarding the final leg of my flight, one of the workers said, “Nice tomato,” which I don’t think was a come on. And the flight attendant asked about the tomato at least five times, not an exaggeration, every time calling it “my tomato”—Where’s my tomato? How’s my tomato? You didn’t lose my tomato, did you? She even directed me to an open seat in the exit row: Why don’t you guys go sit there and stretch out? I gathered my things and set the li’l guy in the window seat so she could look out. When I got my water I poured some into the li’l guy’s soil. When we got bumpy I put my hand on the li’l guy’s container, careful not to snap another arm off. And when we landed, and the pilot put the brakes on hard, my arm reflexively went across the seat, holding the li’l guy in place, the way my dad’s arm would when he had to brake hard in that car without seatbelts to speak of, in one of my very favorite gestures in the encyclopedia of human gestures.

Today when I watched myself, particularly when I was oiling my chest and stomach, which I do kind of by self-hugging, I was thinking how many bodies of mine are in this body, this nearly forty-three-year-old body stationed on this plane for the briefest. I could see, as I always can, probably kind of dysmorphically, my biggest body, when it was 260 pounds and a battering ram and felt sort of impervious. I could also see my twelve-year-old self, chubby and gangly and ashamed. And of course the baby me, who I don’t remember being, though I have seen pictures.

When you watch yourself in the mirror oiling yourself like this, wrapping your arms around yourself, jostling yourself a little, it is easy, or easier, to see yourself as a child, and maybe even a child you really love. It is easy, if you decide it, which might be hard, to let the oiling be of the baby you. Or at least I thought so today, looking at myself, whom I am so often not nice to. But the baby you, you oil until he shines.