Witnessing Delight and Joining Sorrows in Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights (2019), an essay collection by a great American poet, reminds us to carve out time to honor the things in life that are delightful. Ross Gay has compiled here a series of 102 essayettes, all between 1 to 4 pages long, written over the course of a full year, ranging from topics as varied as “the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis” to the experience of “cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane” to “the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture.”
Ross Gay’s work has won many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2016 for his poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and he was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry in 2013. He teaches creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington.
Reading Ross Gay’s essayettes is like a cross between having a conversation with him and peeking over his shoulder while he’s writing his journal. For example, after disclosing that he has been writing these essayettes by hand with a pen instead of a computer because writing is “a process of thinking…made disappearable by the delete button,” he muses that “the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing” (32–33). This is an example of a combination of intentionality and being present in the moment that characterizes the entire book.
The essayettes allow a glimpse into Ross Gay’s consciousness, where he often mixes memory, observation, and reflection:
My dad was an irrepressible know-it-all, which sometimes could be a delight, sometimes not, and one of his delightful facts was that a bumblebee (misnomer—ballerina bee) was an impossibility. Too much mass. Too teeny of wings. Once he said it as one buzzed right by us. That’s impossible, he said, smiling. (64)
As that passage illustrates, the subjects of the essayettes are often related to nature and always feature a delight but not solely things that delight (there are sadnesses, too), and the meaning of delight is never quite defined. However, Gay does reflect on the differences between delight, pleasure, and joy in Chapter 14, “Joy Is Such a Human Madness,” where he articulates delight as “different from pleasure, connected to joy” and that sometimes “terror and delight [sit] next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up” (45).
That delight and terror might sometimes sit together in our souls speaks to the human condition and the idea that we all carry sorrows within us. Gay recalls a student’s comment about her “pedagogical aspirations” that centers on the desire to bridge souls when she asked, “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” (49). He invites us to ponder this notion as he does:
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.
And what if the wilderness—perhaps the densest wild in there—thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?)—is our sorrow? […]
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? (49–50)
This joining of sorrows is part of a larger thread about connection—to humanity, to nature—that winds, vine-like, through the book. We can see it when Gay describes the sight, as he walks through an airport terminal, of two women on break from working at a kiosk, the younger one “gently arranging an older…woman’s collar” but spending “a little more time than necessary” to do so:
“the two of them chatting the whole time, sitting there holding each other, nodding, 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” (114–115).
The image of Ross Gay swiveling his head toward these women just as a sunflower pivots toward the sun is so evocative: as humans, we seek the light of love and bend toward it wherever it might be because it feeds us, helps us grow, keeps us alive. For we will not always be alive, Gay reminds us periodically.
In Chapter 36, Gay calls attention to Donny Hathaway’s voice in his song “For All We Know,” noting that “his is a voice that makes you realize that your voice is the song of your disappearing, which is our most common song. The knowledge of which, the understanding of which, the inhabiting of which, might be the beginning of a radical love. A renovating
love, even” (111–112). I wrote back to him in the margin, asking whether that love can extend to the more-than-human world. For it to be a renovating love, it seems to me, would necessitate an attitude different than the self-centered indifference to our planet’s future—an indifference that allows greed and convenience to guide our lives—would necessitate a radical love that considers our afterlives as seeds springing forth new life—our children’s lives, our children’s children’s lives—the way we might if we saw ourselves as part of the ecosystem.
Ultimately, Ross Gay’s book of delights speaks to what he describes as “a practice of witnessing one’s delight, of being in and with one’s delight, daily, which actually requires vigilance” (108). Reading his essayettes, glimpsing his interiority, is a delight that inspires. I am forced to reflect on the ways in which my own daily habits prohibit me from noticing my own feelings of delight, of bearing witness to the delightful in the everyday, as I rush from one thing to the next, busy busy busy. That when I pause, I am not vigilant but exhausted, more interested in turning off than being attuned. Maybe if I take one thing away from The Book of Delights to apply in my own life, it should be this: to engage in a daily practice of awareness, of noticing and honoring that which delights me, and sharing that delight with someone else.
Additional Resources
Algonquin Books TV. “The Book of Delights by Ross Gay.” YouTube, 6 Nov. 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcLEwL4WQnc.
Cornell English Department. “Reading by Ross Gay.” Spring 2023 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series at Cornell University, 16 May 2023. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-oSsq_fJlc.
Gay, Ross. Web site. https://www.rossgay.net/.
Gay, Ross and Adrian Majteka. Interview. “Ross Gay and Adrian Matejka: The Book of (More) Delights,” 4 Oct. 2023, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttwGG5Xh2ZQ
Indiana Humanities. “Get to Know: Ross Gay.” YouTube, 16 Nov. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IOyA5Lmm4o.
Levine, Philip. “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” From Not this Pig: Poems. Wesleyan University Press, 1968. poetryarchive.org/poem/animals-are-passing-from-our-lives/.
Smith, Zadie. “Joy.” The New York Review of Books, 10 January 2013, www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/01/10/joy/.
