Shots of Joy and Pleasure

Reading Ross Gay's "The Book of Delights"

I am late to the Ross Gay party, but wow, I am glad I showed up. “The Book of Delights” is a series of short essays, written one a day (ok, he skipped some days) between the author’s birthday on August 1, 2016 to his next birthday in 2017.

The essays focus on a “delight” a day, some passing experience, thought, an encounter, a line of music, something growing in the garden, some funny words on a sign. Whatver Ross Gay came across that day that tickled or delighted him got dashed off, by hand, in a little notebook that became an actual book in 2019. Each piece is like someone sprinkled glitter on my day, each delighted observation like champagne bubbles in my nose. Lines like:

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

Do you ever think of yourself, late to your meeting or peed your pants some or sent the private email 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?

Today I am admiring the redbud, this most subtle and radiant of trees, which, like many of the most beautiful things, requires some training to see — to really see, for me anyway, happy as they are tucked in the understory, their thousands of lavender or periwinkle flowers growing from near-black wood for just a couple glorious weeks every spring.

(And indeed, the redbud in front of my own house is a delight to me each spring, too.)

But they are not all the voices of Innocence (in that Blakean sense), because Experience also dances through the delights, sometimes as dark, lurking shapes—the inevitability of death, the persistent danger of living as a Black man in America, the way people have of being cruel even when they don’t need to, terrifying dreams, and the slight, very slight acknowledgement in the entries around January 20, 2017, that America elected Donald Trump as president…and that, too, is a dark, lurking shape.

But the dark shapes are not the point. They are just a backdrop for the shining lights of all these delights.

I am reading one delightful entry each day as part of my morning prayer time. The essays remind me to keep a lookout for delights, to be alert to the vast, wide world that yes, is in danger, that lives in a kind of shadowy realm, that is objectively getting shittier with each passing day, but which is not a giant pile of shit overall.

And so Ross Gay reminds me to notice my own delights: the way the robins show up for Spring way too early and cling to the crab apple trees on the MSU campus, bobbing as the branches sway in subzero winds, with eight inches of snow beneath them, looking shocked and surprised. Or the two rabbits that came last night in the softening darkness, to eat the husks of shells that the birds had scattered across the snow under feeder. Or the way my husband and I move around the kitchen, easily emptying the dishwasher together, doing a domestic dance, courtly and kind.

There is much I am worried about and angry about right now. But The Book of Delights offers an antidote, a palate cleanse, a reminder to look around and just be tickled by all the wonder happening everywhere.