{"id":149359,"date":"2019-12-16T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=149359"},"modified":"2019-12-09T10:19:10","modified_gmt":"2019-12-09T10:19:10","slug":"the-book-of-delights-poet-and-gardener-ross-gays-yearlong-experiment-in-willful-gladness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/12\/the-book-of-delights-poet-and-gardener-ross-gays-yearlong-experiment-in-willful-gladness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Delights: Poet and Gardener Ross Gay\u2019s Yearlong Experiment in Willful Gladness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe more you study delight, the more delight there is to study\u2026 I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThe high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy,\u201d Hermann Hesse wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century in trying to course-correct the budding consumerist conscience toward the small triumphs of attentive presence that make life worth living<\/a>, adding: \u201cMy advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys.\u201d Delights, we may call them. And that is what poet<\/a> Ross Gay<\/strong> does call them as he picks up, a century and a civilizational failure later, where Hesse left off with The Book of Delights<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his yearlong experiment in learning to notice, amid a world that so readily gives us reasons to despair, the daily wellsprings of delight, or what Wendell Berry, in his gorgeous case for delight as a countercultural force of resistance<\/a>, called the elemental pleasures \u201cto which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ross Gay in his beloved community garden<\/p><\/div>\n

Each day, beginning on his forty-second birthday and ending on his forty-third, Gay composed one miniature essay \u2014 \u201cessayettes,\u201d he calls them, in that lovely poet\u2019s way of leavening meaning with makeshift language \u2014 about a particular delight encountered that day, swirled around his consciousness to extract its maximum sweetness. (Delight<\/em>, he tells us, means \u201cout from light,\u201d sharing etymological roots with delicious<\/em> and delectable<\/em>.) What emerges is not a ledger of delights passively logged but a radiant lens actively searching for and magnifying them, not just with the mind but with the body as an instrument of wonder-stricken presence \u2014 the living-gladness counterpart to Tolstoy\u2019s kindred-spirited but wholly cerebral Calendar of Wisdom<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Page after page, small joy after small joy, one is reminded \u2014 almost with the shock of having forgotten \u2014 that delights are strewn about this world like quiet, inappreciable dew-drops, waiting for the sunshine of our attention to turn them into gold.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photograph by Maria Popova<\/p><\/div>\n

He writes:<\/p>\n

Patterns and themes and concerns show up\u2026 My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a passage evocative of those delicious lines from Mary Oliver\u2019s serenade to life<\/a> \u2014 \u201cthere is so much to admire, to weep over \/ and to write music or poems about\u201d \u2014 he adds:<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study\u2026 I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows \u2014 much like love and joy \u2014 when I share it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Art by Cindy Derby from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.<\/p><\/div>\n

And so we learn, as passengers on Gay\u2019s delightcraft, that it is not just a matter of paying attention, but of taking attention, of deliberately shifting it, of diverting the glycogen that pumps our despair muscle and clenches the fist scanning for danger, for that selfsame glycogen is needed to pump our delight muscle and open the palm to hold joy.<\/p>\n

He writes:<\/p>\n

When I began this gathering of essays, which, yes, comes from the French essai, meaning to try, or to attempt, I planned on writing one of these things \u2014 these attempts \u2014 every day for a year. When I decided this I was walking back to my lodging in a castle (delight) from two very strong espressos at a caf\u00e9 in Umbertide (delight), having just accidentally pilfered a handful of loquats from what I thought was a public tree (but upon just a touch more scrutiny was obviously not \u2014 delight!), and sucking on the ripe little fruit, turning the smooth gems of their seeds around in my mouth as wild fennel fronds wisped in the breeze on the roadside, a field of sunflowers stretched to the horizon, casting their seedy grins to the sun above, the honeybees in the linden trees thick enough for me not only to hear but to feel in my body, the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener.<\/p><\/div>\n

To be sure, this capacity for drinking in the glorious everythingness of the world is rooted in recognizing the immense and improbable elemental delight of one\u2019s own existence \u2014 the consequence of what Gay calls \u201cthe many thousand \u2014 million! \u2014 accidents \u2014 no, impossibilities! \u2014 leading to our births,\u201d that miracle of chance he had contemplated a decade earlier in a wondrous poem<\/a>. He marvels at the improbable origin of his own delight:<\/p>\n

For god\u2019s sake, my white mother had never even met a black guy! My father failed out of Central State (too busy looking good and having fun, so they say), got drafted, and was counseled by his old man to enlist in the navy that day so as not to go where the black and brown and poor kids go in the wars of America. And they both ended up, I kid you not, in Guam. Black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination. Comes some babies, one of them me.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the readiest sources of daily delight comes \u2014 predictably, given the well documented physiological and psychological consolations of nature<\/a> \u2014 from his beloved community garden. (Gay is as much a poet as he is a devoted gardener, though perhaps as Emily Dickinson well knew<\/a>, the two are but a single occupation.) In an early-August essayette titled \u201cInefficiency,\u201d he writes:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s the time I\u2019ve spent in the garden (spent an interesting word), which is somehow an exercise in supreme attentiveness \u2014 staring into the oregano blooms wending through the lowest branches of the goumi bush and the big vascular leaves of the rhubarb\u2014and also an exercise in supreme inattention, or distraction, I should say, or fleeting intense attentions, I should say, or intense fleeting attentions \u2014 did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by Ashleigh Corrin from Layla\u2019s Happiness by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie<\/p><\/div>\n

Perhaps the most charming category of delights Gay encounters throughout the year are what he terms \u201cunequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers.\u201d One September day, wandering through a small town in Indiana where he had just given a poetry reading at the local college and where \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d signs glare from an auto-shop selling foreign cars, he records this:<\/p>\n

While I was working, headphones on, swaying to the new De La Soul record (delight, which deserves its own entry), I noticed a white girl \u2014 she looked fifteen, but could\u2019ve been, I suppose, a college student \u2014 standing next to me with her hand raised. I looked up, confused, pulled my headphones back, and she said, like a coach or something, \u201cWorking on your paper?! Good job to you! High five!\u201d And you better believe I high-fived that child in her preripped Def Leppard shirt and her itty-bitty Doc Martens. For I love, I delight in, unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers. What constitutes pleasant, it\u2019s no secret, is informed by my large-ish, male, and cisgender body, a body that is also large-ish, male, cisgender, and not white. In other words, the pleasant, the delightful, are not universal. We all should understand this by now. <\/em><\/p>\n

A few months ago, walking down the street in Umbertide, in Italy, a trash truck pulled up beside me and the guy in the passenger\u2019s seat yelled something I didn\u2019t understand. I said, \u201cComo,\u201d the Spanish word for \u201ccome again,\u201d which is a ridiculous thing to say because even if he had come again I wouldn\u2019t have understood him. He knew this, and hopping out of the truck to dump in a couple cans, he flexed his muscles, pointed at me, and smacked my biceps hard. Twice! I loved him! Or when a waitress puts her hand on my shoulder. (Forget it if she calls me honey. Baby even better.) Or someone scooting by puts their hand on my back. The handshake. The hug. I love them both.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Art by Simona Ciraolo from Hug Me<\/p><\/div>\n

And then there are his parenthetical meta-delights \u2014 parentheses applied, in proper Lewis Thomas fashion<\/a>, as containers of delight, wherein the container itself is delightful. For instance, this:<\/p>\n

(A delight that we can heal our loved ones, even the dead ones.) Oh broken. Oh beautiful.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or this, nestled into his Indiana-small-town experience:<\/p>\n

(A feature of the small-town Midwest: a city-hallish building in the center, always with some sad statue trumpeting one war or another. This one had a guy in one of those not-very-protective-looking hats they called a helmet during WWI. He\u2019s carrying, naturally, a gun. Jena Osman\u2019s book Public Figures alerted me to the ubiquity of the gun, the weapon, in the hands of our statues. A delight I wish to now imagine and even impose, given that beneficent dictatorship [of one\u2019s own life, anyway] is a delight, all new statues must have in their hands flowers or shovels or babies or seedlings or chinchillas \u2014 we could go on like this for a while. But never again \u2014 never ever \u2014 guns. I decree it, and also decree the removal of the already extant guns. Let the emptiness our war heroes carry be the metaphor for a while.)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by Olivier Tallec from What If\u2026 by Thierry Lenain<\/p><\/div>\n

This transmutation of terror into transcendence haunts the book as a guiding spirit. In an early-autumn essayette, drawing on Zadie Smith\u2019s elegant reflections on joy<\/a>, and on Rilke, and on Edmund Burke and the Romantics, Gay offers the daring theory that joy is \u201cnot a feeling or an accomplishment: it\u2019s an entering and a joining with the terrible.\u201d He then tests it in the only laboratory we have for our life-theories \u2014 our own being-in-the-world:<\/p>\n

I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization \u2014 in that clear way, not that oh yeah way \u2014 that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now.<\/em><\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/em><\/p>\n

Among the most beautiful things I\u2019ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: \u201cWhat if we joined our wildernesses together?\u201d Sit with that for a minute.<\/em><\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/em><\/p>\n

It astonishes me sometimes \u2014 no, often \u2014 how every person I get to know \u2014 everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything \u2014 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. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is \u2014 and if we join them \u2014 your wild to mine \u2014 what\u2019s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I\u2019m saying. I\u2019m saying: What if that is joy?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Art by Lia Halloran for The Universe in Verse.<\/p><\/div>\n

Complement the infinitely delightful Book of Delights<\/strong><\/a> with poet Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie\u2019s lovely picture-book<\/a> about happiness as a daily practice of noticing and Michael McCarthy\u2019s meditation on nature and the serious work of joy<\/a>, then revisit Bill T. Jones\u2019s spellbinding Universe in Verse performance<\/a> of one of Ross Gay\u2019s poems.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe more you study delight, the more delight there is to study\u2026 I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":149360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1177],"class_list":["post-149359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}