The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization—in that clear way, not that oh yeah way—that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now.

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.

What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

The phrase—a colloquialism (a regionalism?) not native to me—“I’m gonna get me some x,” which these days I myself occasionally employ. The understanding of a multiplicity of selves, of a complexity of self. A self-weirding. I does not equal me.

And further, I wonder if this impulse suggests—and this is just a hypothesis, though I suspect there is enough evidence to make it a theorem—that our delight grows as we share it.

I think I am advocating for a kind of innovation, or an innovative spirit, which seems often to be occasioned by deprivation, or being broke. Or broke-ass. Which condition I am adamantly not advocating. But I am advocating for the delight one feels making a fire pit with the inside of a dryer, or keeping the dryer door shut with an exercise band, which is probably caused by endorphins released from a bout of cognitive athleticism. Which is also called figuring something out. Which is something we all go to school, some of us for years and years, to forget how to do.