One summer day in 2016, the poet and essayist Ross Gay decided, in his words, “that it might feel nice, even useful to write a daily essay about something delightful.”
He began on his next birthday, Aug. 1, and finished a year later. The resulting collection of short essays, “The Book of Delights,” is infused with optimism as it finds joy in all sorts of aspects of life: praying mantises, Zadie Smith’s writing, getting a drink in a coffee shop, an unexpected comment about pecans.
Gay will discuss “The Book of Delights” in the 2021 Everybody Reads community reading program’s culminating event, which consists of an April 8 virtual lecture and a followup conversation with Portland author Lidia Yuknavitch. He recently chatted with The Oregonian/OregonLive about the book. Here are five takeaways from the conversation.
One key component of delight is sharing it.
“It feels good. It’s just fun, you know?” Gay said. “In the book, I’m suggesting or wondering about this notion that we’re inclined to share what delights us or inclined to share what we love.”
That, he added, raises the question, “What are our practices of sharing? Or what are our practices of interdependence or our practices of being mutually in need to one another? How do we do that?”
Another component of delight: Surprise.
“I was recently reading somewhere that delight and surprise are really tangled up with one another,” Gay said, adding, “like seeing birds in an airport.”
Gardens can be a big source of delight.
“Gardens are places of contemplation, study, noticing surprise, beauty,” Gay said. “Another thing is that gardens have a different relationship to time,” a relationship that’s inherently delightful: “I didn’t realize the peonies opened. … Or I didn’t see that, you know, the groundhog had moved under the shed.”
Delight can be subversive.
In one essay, Gay writes about being in a hotel elevator and seeing a quotation from Thomas Jefferson that strikes him as ridiculous. The delight there, Gay said, lay in exposing “the lie behind the quote” and in musing that Jefferson would not have comprehended the circumstances: Gay being a Black poet on his way to visit another Black poet.
Delight can be a conscious practice.
The experience of writing “The Book of Delights” has “fundamentally informed how I orient a little bit, in terms of my attentions and my questions,” Gay said. Then there’s the tangible payoff: “If you’re a person like me who carries notebooks around … your pockets are full of delights.”
Tickets to Gay’s virtual appearance are “pay what you will”: $0 for a community ticket, $15 for the access rate, $40 for the suggested rate, $100 for patrons, and are available at literary-arts.org.
awang@oregonian.com; Twitter: @ORAmyW
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