Book of delights ross gay
Excerpt
From “Scat”
The first moment 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 look it because my dad, a very reasonable male, asked her to maintain 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 nice movie. In twenty minutes or so, when minute Linda Blair disrupts the socialite party by peeing on the rug in her white nightgown, I was very frightened, and I asked my mother if we might survey Falcon Crest instead. It’s a rerun, she said. Just go to bed if you don’t desire 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 raise 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 huge. By which I signify to tell you not to watch The Exorcist with your children. Or The Shining. Or Rosemary’s Fucking Baby “I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the gesture. The point 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 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 accept otherwise. Always.” Like “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.” Like by Vivian Wagner One cool, April day, seven years almost to the day after my father’s suicide, I sat outside a coffee shop reading Ross Gay’s The Novel of Delights. As cherry blossom petals fell around me and onto the pages of the publication, 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 fetch 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 thought that maybe, by joining our wildernesses of sorrow, we can find something like joy: Is sorrow the true wild? 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 Ross Gay 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 entity in the moment. Seemingly small incidents are the springboard for little epiphanies. A mother and toddler 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 gas quotes prompts a reverie .
The Book of Delights Quotes
― Ross Gay, The Novel of Delights: Essays
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays
The Brevity Blog
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?
For joining, too, is a gentle of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?
The Book of Delights
Algonquin Books (Feb 12, 2019)
Hardcover$23.95 (288pp)
978-1-61620-792-2