The Book of Delights

In this essay, Gay talks about the nickname he has assigned his friend, Curtis. Instead of calling him Curtis, Gay calls him “Boogie,” which is ironic because Curtis never dances. Similarly, Curtis calls Gay “Salpicon,” and Gay imagines that Curtis has a similarly ironic reason for assigning Gay this nickname. Gay then lists many of the nicknames he has collected over his lifetime, many of which start with “B.” He wonders if this means he is considered primal since “b” is the “babiest of sounds” (41). He notes that he rarely calls the people he loves by their given names, but by the nicknames he assigns them. He then wonders if that means he thinks of the people he loves as his children and considers this to be partially patronizing, but altogether lovely.

Here, Gay recounts a conversation he has with Stephanie about the phrase, “Whoop-de-doo.” In Gay’s mind, the phrase always indicates something bad, but Stephanie questions whether the phrase must always be bad. Then, Gay remembers many ironic phrases like this, especially the way his mother would say “la-di-da.” This memory leads to another of Gay and his childhood friends singing loudly in the backseat of a car, and he realizes that these ironic phrases may not always be negative after all.

In this substantially longer essay, Gay recites a quote from Zadie Smith’s essay “Joy,” that “joy is such a human madness” (44). In Smith’s essay, she differentiates pleasure from joy and says that joy is the fact that the intolerable makes life worthwhile. To illustrate this point, Gay uses the example of parenthood. When raising children, it feels like terror and delight are sitting next to each other with their feet dangling off a high bridge. He uses another example of knowing that one is going to die, and therefore enjoying mundane activities like grocery shopping in a deep and meaningful way. Ultimately, Gay says that joy is joining one’s wilderness with your own. He says that everyone has a hidden sorrow, and that sorrow creates a wilderness within them. By combining wildernesses, one is creating joy.

In the first half of this essay, Gay considers why poetry seems to have fallen from favor. Many of his colleagues blame the New Yorker for spreading the hatred of poetry, but Gay has seen hundreds pack into a bar for poetry readings, has witnessed poetry at every wedding he’s attended, and doesn’t care that poetry seems to have gone out of style. He then recalls a poetry reading he did at a college recently, where a student told Gay that his poems felt like the dancing in the movie House Party. Gay considers this the highest praise he’s ever received and explains his fondness for the movie comes from hours of rehearsing songs from it for a ninth-grade talent show with his friends.

On his way to the laundromat, which he loves, Gay watches a hummingbird sit in a mostly dead tree and stay perfectly still, even as Gay walks directly beneath it. Stephanie considers hummingbirds to be his totem animal because he sees them so frequently. Once, after Gay saw a hummingbird outside a classroom window, he stood outside with a flower in his hand until the bird returned and drank from his hand. Another time, he made a new friend and was sitting in this woman’s garden as a hummingbird drank from flowers directly behind the woman’s head as she told Gay about a friend whose ill husband had encouraged his wife to find new lovers, which the wife did.

This essay begins with Gay’s thoughts about Montaigne’s writings but quickly moves on to his recollection of dreams. In many of Gay’s dreams, he is trying to get out of something. He gives the example of wanting to get out of being Hillary Clinton’s Vice President, and the many dreams where he is in an airplane that is falling or cannot get to an important event on time because of traffic. He recalls other, more disturbing dreams as well, such as sleeping with his mother for two years straight or murdering someone and leaving their severed head on a chair while he and his friends share a beer. He records these dreams as a delight because nothing is as delightful as waking from a dream and realizing it was just a dream and nothing real.

The title of this essay comes from Gay’s friend, Pat, who reacted to the story about Gay’s neighbor. The neighbor, a large man with a camouflage hat and an AC/DC t-shirt, had befriended the deer that visited his yard. One day, the man’s blood sugar was dangerously low, and he passed out in his yard. He awoke to the deer licking his face.

In this essay, Gay focuses on the flowers of an amaranth plant that has sprung up between cracks in the sidewalk. The seeds planted themselves on the sidewalk after being blown from a potted amaranth plant behind a chain-link fence with barbed wire. The closer he gets to the flower, he can see bumble bees, the color variation from lavender to bright pink, and the millions of seeds that are contained in each flower. Gay thinks of how many flowers will come of those thousands of seeds, and how many more seeds will come from the flowers, and so on. That is what he means when he speaks of exponential growth. Finding beauty in the cracks in the sidewalk is what he looks for when he studies joy.

In this essay, Gay focuses on the double tap he received on the arm from a flight attendant as the 50-year-old man placed Gay’s seltzer on his tray table and said, “There you go, man.” By calling Gay “man,” the flight attendant created an almost familial intimacy. Though Americans make it a rule not to touch each other, some people are constantly trying to touch others. At that moment, the flight attendant rewrote Gay’s understanding of physical touch and reminded him that there are other, harmless modes of touch.

Gay says that his delight in coffee served without a useless saucer might border on being a fetish. He hates carrying a small coffee drink to his table, precariously balancing the cup and spoon on a saucer. Recently, he visited a café where, upon his second visit, the barista remembered him and his distaste for saucers, serving his coffee without the unnecessary little plate. This delighted Gay immensely. However, as he writes the current essay, he is in a different café in Greenwich Village and the college-age barista pays no attention to him and hardly needs to look at what she’s doing as she places his mug on a saucer and serves him. The woman doesn’t look at Gay as she serves him as if she is pretending that she is not Gay’s sister.

While writing this piece, Gay is trying to remember whether it was a lily or an iris embroidered on the jeans of a woman he saw walking out of the Salvation Army in Pennsylvania. He knows he ought to be able to distinguish a lily from an iris, especially considering that a lily was the first flower he planted in his garden. He prays to the flower every day in the four to six weeks it is in bloom by kneeling and sticking his face in the flower, with his eyes closed and lips puckered. He feels like he is drowning in the flower as it kills him with delight, but knows that the flower will resurrect him. He ends the essay with an “amen” (65).

Gay is in Chinatown and watches a mother and child carry a grocery bag, each holding one handle. It seems counterproductive, as each person would likely walk at a different pace, but they eventually match each other’s speed and rhythm of walking. Sharing a bag delights Gay so much because it is unnecessary. The bag could be carried easily by one person, yet they choose to share the burden, making it a delight.

When Gay begins this essay, he is in a café across the street from a favorite Indian restaurant. The last time he was in that restaurant, the owner told him she had been thinking of him on Sunday, specifically. This makes the comment genuine, almost as if the woman had been praying for him. Now, in the bakery, Gay is reading and frequently moving his foot out of the way as people walk in and out of the café. He watches a man open his umbrella, as if forgetting he was still inside, and then giggle at himself and smirk as he walks out of the building. Gay recognizes the smirk as an expression of gentleness and self-forgiveness. He ends the essay wondering if anyone has ever done anything embarrassing, like ordering coffee with their fly down, or opening an umbrella inside, and thought they were the cutest thing.