The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.

the process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out its own archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is.

To be sure, it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it’s kept.

I will pause here to offer a false etymology: de-light suggests both “of light” and “without light.” And both of them concurrently is what I’m talking about. What I think I’m talking about. Being of and without at once. Or: joy.

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.

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.

“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 th...

“How long until the hickories start making their fruit?” I asked Michael. He said, “Oh, they’ll be in full production in about 200 to 250 years.”

But somehow no one ever dies of these things, or is even hurt, aside from my sad little annoyance monster, who, for the record, never smiles and always wears a crooked bow tie.

It is beneath your dignity to mention that the annoyance always originates in the annoyed, which is why I have personified it and housed that personification in the body. Maybe it’s an unacknowledged lack-of-control feeling that stokes it. Maybe it’s dehydration or hunger or sleepiness, poor baby.

I’ve been told there is a term for this among behavioral psychologists, which foregrounds the behavior as opposed to what intrigues me, which is the fact of our bodies’ ubiquitous porosities, how so often, and mostly unbeknownst, our bodies are the bodies of others.

joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.

But books do not, the way the poet today did, cough and excuse herself and sip some water and comment on the pollen, sending you into a lilac-inspired daydream, wiping your own nose on your sleeve. Books do not look searchingly while communicating their contents at the twelve or thirteen people gathered on couches in what must’ve been one of the most passive-aggressively lit rooms in America. Books do not, mid-poem, reach the forefinger and thumb into one’s mouth to gently fish out an eyelash. There are multiplicities within a human body

reading poems that a poem on a page will never reproduce. In other words, books don’t die. And preferring them to people won’t prevent our doing so.

One of the many delights of a garden, I am finding, are the ways it encourages jenkiness. Something about the delirium incited by lily blooms or the pollinators’ swooning over the bush cherry interrupts one’s relationship to commerce, perhaps. The garden makes you grab the nearest thing so you can keep crawling through it. It might be that the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism.

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.

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.

What you don’t know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you’re carrying a baby. A quiet baby.

All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues. 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. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book not the Bible and you’re almost golden. Almost.

It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption.

Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is. And while having interpolated the policing of delight such that I am on the lookout for the overseer even in photos I have studied hundreds of times, on the lookout always for the policer of delight, my work is studying this kind of glee, being on the lookout for it, and aspiring to it, floating away from the factory, as she seems to be.

All of these examples make clear that touched often also means exuberant or enthusiastic, both of which qualities can provoke in us, when we are feeling small and hurtable, something like embarrassment, which again maybe points to the terror at our own lurking touchedness.

And witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its

abundance in another, moonwalking toward the half and half, or ringing his bell on Cass Street, can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.

I go in and out of collecting my urine for my garden, and was reminded of the bounty our bodies produce, aka our forgotten station in the nutrient cycle—I wonder if this simple forgetting, this collective amnesia, that we are, in fact, part of the nutrient cycle is the source of our gravest problem, namely, that we are in the long process of making our planet uninhabitable to many species, including ourselves—upon

I have taken note of how delight and nostalgia, delight and loneliness, which I will further clarify as existential loneliness, irremediable loneliness, are, in this

one, connected. They are kin. Seems a good thing to know.

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.

And a handwritten letter in which my friend explained that delight means “out from light” and is etymologically connected to delicious, to delectable, which I did not know despite this past year turning and turning delight over, which connects delight also to cultivation. Makes it a garden.