4/5 stars
The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay (2019)
It IS a delight, this book! Ross Gay's essays remind us to look around each day and find the good. It reminded me that for one full year in 2019-2020 I wrote down something I was thankful for every single day. I tweeted them so they were always fairly short - not essay-length - but it was during the timeframe of my dad declining and then passing away so it very much tested my ability to find the joy of each day, and I loved doing it. This book also reminded me of John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed, which is one of my favorite books of all time.
These essays each focus on something in Gay's daily life. Some are just a few paragraphs, some a few pages. Things he has observed, his experiences as he moves through life, including to do with friendships, loss, race, gender norms, the natural world, and more. It's written in a beautiful poetry-like prose, in bite-sized pieces that you can read all at once, or savor over a longer period of time. Here are a few of my favorite passages:
On caretaking:
...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 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.
On joy:
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. And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers... is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith's term, the "intolerable." 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... Is this, sorrow... the great wilderness? 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?
On his practice of essay-writing (finding himself writing multiple essays on days that were filled with delight, but that defeats the purpose of doing one each day):
...the practice of witnessing one's delight, daily, which actually requires vigilance. It also requires faith that delight will be with you daily, that you needn't hoard it. No scarcity of delight.
UP NEXT: Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch
