The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

I’m trying to remember the last day I haven’t been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country.

The eyes and heart of a nation are not avoidable things.

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?

“You need to value your ignorance.”

The laughing snort: among the most emphatic evidences of delight.

Friends, we all occasionally say some stupid shit.

But this Jeffersonian sentence especially glows with stupidity, with cruelty, when you picture him at his desk, up before the sun in his parlor, drinking tea he did not make or pour, eating a crumpet he did not make or put on a plate, scratching this and other pithy statements with his quill dipped into a well he did not fill, because he owned six hundred people, most of whom were probably already at work.

Being a middle-aged person now, it’s no surprise that I worry that any odd gesture might smuggle with it the possibility for misperception as flirting with beginning-aged people, some of whom I teach, and that, friends, is a losing battle.

How do we thank our dead teachers?

It might be that the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism.

For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception.

any propeller on an adult bike constitutes keeping it 100.