The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

I wonder if this impulse to share, the urge to elbow your neighbor, who maybe was not even your neighbor until the bird flew between you up into the pipes and rafters you did not notice until you followed the bird there, is also among the qualities of delight? 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 do not want to be the kind of person who feels superior, or is irritated, or, god forbid, sneers at a sign that has a typo or a grammatical error, especially if that sign is not in an English department. I have a feeling you know what I mean.

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