The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

“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.

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.

This snot-mouthed situation is ripe for such self-beration, which might in the past have included a self-imposed exile from her supermarket, and recurrent, crippling bouts of disgust and shame. But these days my mother tells this story of buying chicken noodle soup with a river of snot running into her mouth and laughs so hard that she has to hold her head up. She laughs and holds the kitchen table lest she fall from her chair telling the story. She gasps and cries a little bit. She is accepting, it seems, what she is: one of the varieties of light.