Book of delights ross gay

The Book of Delights Quotes

“I imagine I could use time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The signal 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 start doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else proceed 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 machine wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a recline that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”
― Ross Gay, The Novel of Delights: Essays

“It didn’t grab me long to learn that the discipline or apply of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the maturation of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you analyze delight, the more delight there is to study.”
― Ross Male lover, The Book of Delights: Essays

The Brevity Blog

by Vivian Wagner

One chilly, April day, seven years almost to the day after my father’s suicide, I sat outside a coffee shop reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. As cherry blossom petals fell around me and onto the pages of the book, I came across this passage in one of its essays, “‘Joy Is Such a Human Madness’”

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. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always of everything.

The essay ends with the idea that maybe, by joining our wildernesses of sorrow, we can find something enjoy joy:

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 that is joy?

Not for the first time in reading The Book of Delights, I found myself crying. And then, as if on cue, a woman walked past with a cup of coffee. I smiled at her through my tears, a

The Book of Delights

Ross Gay
Algonquin Books (Feb 12, 2019)
Hardcover$23.95 (288pp)
978-1-61620-792-2

Ross Gay is known for his poetry, but The Book of Delights proves that he’s also an adept essayist. In composing the book, Gay operated under a simple principle: keep a diary of entries over the course of one year, with each entry concerning something joyful. From this conceit he spins out a variety of reflections that are sometimes whimsical, sometimes touching, and always thoughtful.

Certain topics run throughout The Book of Delights, including Gay’s love of gardening, the emotional impact of his favorite songs, and his appreciation for existence in the moment. Seemingly small incidents are the springboard for little epiphanies. A mother and youth sharing the burden of carrying a shopping bag across the street leads to a moving paean to mutual support. A shared high-five with a stranger becomes a tribute to human connection. A Lisa Loeb song leads to a memory about a childhood friend who invaded Gay’s house to rearrange his furniture in an elaborate prank. Another friend’s overuse of breeze quotes prompts a reverie

Excerpt

From “Scat”

The first time I saw The Exorcist I was nine years old. My mom, flipping through the TV Guide, saw that it was coming on HBO, and she wanted to see it because my dad, a very sensible man, asked her to hold off when it first came out. She was pregnant with my brother and people watching the movie were having miscarriages and heart attacks in the theater, both of which used to be evidence of a good film. In twenty minutes or so, when little Linda Blair disrupts the socialite party by peeing on the rug in her colorless nightgown, I was very frightened, and I asked my mother if we might watch Falcon Crest instead. It’s a rerun, she said. Just leave to bed if you don’t need to watch it.

(Friends, I am here going to leap a boundary I shouldn’t, like some of your childless ex-friends before me, to tell you how to hoist your children. My brother’s and my bedroom was, maybe, twenty feet from this television. It was maybe three or four seconds by foot away. But my imagination was vast. By which I indicate to tell you not to observe The Exorcist with your children. Or The Shining. Or Rosemary’s Fucking Infant