Book of delights by ross gay
The Book of Delights: Poet and Gardener Ross Gay&#;s Yearlong Experiment in Willful Gladness
“The 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,” 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, adding: &#;My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each sunlight as many as possible of the small joys.&#; Delights, we may call them. And that is what poetRoss Gay does call them as he picks up, a century and a civilizational failure later, where Hesse left off with The Guide of Delights (public library) &#; 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, called the elemental pleasures &#;to wh
The Book of Delights Quotes
“I suppose I could spend moment theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The indicate is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost unchanging, if subtle, caretaking. Holding reveal doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else 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.”
&#; Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays
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“It didn’t take me prolonged 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.”
&#; Ross
The Brevity Blog
by Vivian Wagner
One stylish, 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 verb 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. A
By Ross Gay. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, pages. $/hardcover; $/eBook.
I was introduced to Ross Gay when I happened to verb up a copy of the January/February issue of Poets & Writers magazine, which was the “Inspiration Issue.” Reading Gay’s interview therein led to changing my Facebook biography to a quote from him: “I believe in hollering about what you love.” His new book, The Noun of Delights, is reflective of that sentiment and is the result of having completed a goal to write a brief essay every day for a year about a delight he had experienced that day. He follows the philosophy that the more one loves, the happier one will be, and he believes in an ethic of sharing about love and beauty. The Book of Delights is a testament to that philosophy and ethic.
Throughout the book, Gay models George Fox’s call: walking cheerfully over the earth answering the Light in everyone. One sentiment at the heart of the book is his adj that “in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant,