The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

Anyway, you get it; the older I get—in all likelihood closer to my death than to my birth, despite all the arugula and quinoa—the more I think of this day as a delight.

I come from people for whom—as I write this, lounging, sipping coffee, listening to the oatmeal talking in the pot—inefficiency was not, mostly, an option, I suppose, given being kind of broke and hustling to stay afloat with two kids and a car always breaking and their own paper routes on top of their jobs and such does not so much afford the delight of inefficiency.

And there I go, past the turn-off to the veggie burger on the hill, zoom, being efficient, zoom, getting something important done, zoom, being productive, zoom, as just up the hill and around the bend waits a simple delight, a slow and abiding delight, the passing of which usually only gets me to an airport where, in the dream, I almost always miss my flight, and if I don’t, the plane will fall from the sky.

(delight!: the word bombing wrested from military discourse to mean going fast down a hill on a bike or skateboard, especially to the vegan bakery),

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.

A guy on his way out, after buying his Americano and scooting by my big red bobbing foot, and smiling softly at me, and me at him, looked at the drizzle through the big plate-glass window, put his coffee down, opened his umbrella, put it over his head, picked up his coffee, then realized, I presume, that he was still inside this bakery. (The window was very clean.) I saw him giggle to himself, realizing, I think, what he had done—let me interrupt to mention that a man with a sack of some sort slung over his shoulder just entered Choc-O-Pain and exclaimed, “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’m also delighting in this accouterment fluffing around my neck because it represents a different relationship to an idea of masculinity I have inherited, and for much of my life watered, which makes it a garden. A garden of rocks. A garden of sorrow and hypertension and prostate woe.

For I kid you not, ten years ago I no sooner would have worn this plush purple thing around my neck than jump off a bridge. I mean, not quite, but you get me. Tied into this weird and imprecise moratorium on the pretty were surely currents, strong ones, of misogyny, and probably homophobia.

my head twisting toward them like a sunflower as I finished the stairs and walked by, so in love was I with this common flourish of love, this everyday human light.

The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.

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.

As I write this it’s occurring to me that the books I most adore are the ones that archive the people who have handled them—dogears, or old receipts used as bookmarks (always a lovely digression). Underlines and exclamation points, and this in an old library book! The tender vandalisms by which, sometimes, we express our love. Or a fingerprint, made of some kind of oil, maybe from peanut butter, which it would be if it was mine. Or a tea stain, and a note to oneself only oneself could decipher.

(Aside: Shouldn’t we pause to admire the onomatopoeicness of jenky? Because no word I know sounds more like my crooked shed door. Sounds more like duct tape being ripped from the roll.)

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.

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,

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. And it’s probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed—in

She is accepting, it seems, what she is: one of the varieties of light.

suspect it is simply a feature of being an adult, what I will call being grown, or a grown person, to have endured some variety of thorough emotional turmoil, to have made your way to the brink, and, if you’re lucky, to have stepped back from it—if not permanently, then for some time, or time to time.