The Book of Delights

“It’s my forty-second birthday. And it would make perfect (if self-involved) sense to declare the day of my birth a delight, despite the many years I’ve almost puritanically paid no attention to it. A sad performance of a certain masculine nonchalance, nonflamboyance. Might’ve been, poor thing. Now it’s all I can do not to bedeck myself in every floral thing imaginable—today both earrings and socks. Oh! And my drawers, hibiscus patterned, with the coddling pocket in front to boot. And if there’s some chance to wear some bright and clanging colors, believe me. Some bit of healing for my old man, surely, who would warn us against wearing red, lest we succumb to some stereotype I barely even know. (A delight that we can heal our loved ones, even the dead ones.) Oh broken. Oh beautiful.”

This first paragraph of Gay’s first essay, “My Birthday, Kinda,” introduces many themes and motifs that recur in his essays. First, he briefly mentions the understanding of masculinity he learned as a child, and how he is rewriting that understanding in his adult life by wearing bright colors and patterns. He also mentions healing loved ones, even dead ones, touching on the theme of growth, change, and healing. Lastly, he mentions the flowers on his underwear, showing his love and understanding of the natural world.

“I’m trying to remember the last day I haven’t been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country. When talking to my friend Kia about struggling with paranoia, she said, ‘You’d have to be crazy not to be paranoid as a black person in this country.’ Crazy not to think they want to put a hole in your head.”

The last few lines of “Hole in the Head” introduces a main theme in Gay’s essays: his experience as a Black man living in the United States. This is one of many essays that focuses on the violence and hate toward Black individuals and highlights a specific story about systematic and intentional violence. As with most of the essays, he ends it with a personal reflection and confesses how paranoia is a normal and necessary part of his experience as a Black man.

“If you’re black in this country you’re presumed guilty. Or, to come back to Abdel, who’s a schoolteacher and thinks a lot about children, you’re not allowed to be innocent. The eyes and heart of a nation are not avoidable things. The imagination of a country is not an avoidable thing. And the negreeting, back home, where we are mostly never seen, is a way of witnessing each other’s innocence—a way of saying, ‘I see your innocence.’”

In this essay, “The Negreeting,” Gay again focuses on the theme of, not only his experience as a Black man in the US but the collective experience of Black people. After sharing about the “negreeting”—the act of one Black person nodding at another—Gay explains why the “negreeting” is so important. This essay highlights the necessity of community and acknowledging one another in a country where Black people are either invisible or considered guilty.

“I grabbed the bucket, trimmed the cuttings into sticks, potted them in the plastic bag, and set them on the counter, where they say like promises. Little converters. Little dreamers of coming back in bloom. And how we might carry that with us wherever we go.”

This is one of the first quotes to demonstrate Gay’s knowledge and love of gardening. It is not only a hobby for him, but carries deep emotional weight, demonstrated by how he associates the fig cuttings with promises and dreams. The life and promises represented by the cuttings contrast with the funeral Gay just attended for a young woman. The natural world here reminds Gay that the earth is cyclical, and so is life and death.

“And given as I am writing a book of delights, and I am ultimately interested in joy, I am curious about the relationship between pleasure and delight—pleasure as Smith offers it, and delight. I will pause here to offer a false etymology: de-light suggests both ‘of light’ and ‘without light.’ And both of them concurrently is what I’m talking about. What I’m thinking about. Being of and without at once. Or: joy.”

This quote summarizes the entire point of Gay’s Book of Delights. He wants to understand how joy exists during pain and pleasure. The delights he records do not diminish his suffering but augment it and make it more bearable. He acknowledges that without the pain, he wouldn’t be as aware of the delights around him and that both existing at the same time make joy.

“This is what I think exponential growth actually means. This is why I study gratitude. Or what I mean when I say it. From a crack in the street.”

After describing how a plant began growing from a crack in the sidewalk, Gay concludes the essay with this quote. After explaining how miraculous the growth of a plant from a seed is, he explains how that growth is an example of why he studies gratitude because gratitude is like a plant rooting in the crack of a sidewalk and producing beautiful, vibrant flowers which will, in turn, produce more seeds and create more colorful blooms.

“By which, it’s really a kind of miracle, was expressed by a social and bodily intimacy—on this airplane, at this moment in history, our particular bodies, making the social contract of mostly not touching each other irrelevant, or, rather, writing a brief addendum that acknowledges the official American policy, which is a kind of de facto and terrible touching of some of us, or trying to, always figuring out a way to keep touching us—and this flight attendant, tap tap, reminding me like that, simply, remember, tap tap, how else we might be touched, and are, there you go, man.”

In this essay, Gay marvels at how a simple “tap tap” from a flight attendant briefly rewrote the unspoken American understanding that stranger-touching is taboo. He also highlights how certain people, particularly Black people, are constantly being touched against their will. This touch from the flight attendant qualifies as a delight to Gay because it reminds him that all people are a family and not all touch from strangers is ill-intentioned. Touch can be non-weighted. This quote also demonstrates Gay’s style of writing essays like trains of thought, ignoring traditional sentence structure in favor of long, flowing sentences.

“Do you ever think of yourself, late to your meeting or peed your pants some or sent a private email to the group or burned the soup or ordered your cortado with your fly down or snot on your face, or opened your umbrella in the bakery, as the cutest little thing?”

This quote is one of many highlighting the beauty of humans being humans. Gay takes great delight in the little idiosyncrasies and imperfections that make people who they are and records them. In this essay, he watches a young man open his umbrella inside and laugh at himself, and it reminds Gay of his own experiences doing something silly and laughing at himself. Foibles are human and therefore objects of delight.

“I’m also delighting in this accouterment fluffing around my neck because it represents a different relationship to an idea of masculinity I have inherited, and for much of my life watered, which makes it a garden.”

This quote includes many themes and motifs important to Gay. First, he mentions his relationship with masculinity and how it has developed over his life. He openly admits that wearing the fluffy, lavender scarf his friend made him would have embarrassed him earlier in life, yet now, he embraces it. He also refers to this relationship as a garden, highlighting how Gay thinks of life and ideas as things that grow and change in relationship to each other.

“So today I’m recalling the utility, the need, of my own essayists to emerge from such dailiness, and in that way to be a practice of witnessing one’s delight, of being in and with one’s delight, daily, which actually requires vigilance. It also requires faith that delight will be with you daily, that you needn’t hoard it. No scarcity of delight.”

In this essay, “Stacking Delights,” Gay admits that he had been recording delights from previous days to write entries about later. He challenges himself to live presently and trust that he will find enough delights each day. Gay frequently mentions the value of being present and having faith in the world despite setbacks and disappointments. There is a natural human impulse to hoard that which one expects to lose, and it’s delightful to have faith that delight will be present always when one is looking.

“The knowledge of which, the understanding of which, the inhabiting of which, might be the beginning of a radical love. A renovating love, even.”

In the essay “Donny Hathaway on Pandora,” Gay dissects the lyrics of a song and explains how the song is about death. Gay says that acknowledging, understanding, and inhabiting the fact that all will die is the starting place for true, genuine love. This passage displays Gay’s flowing, poetic writing style.

“They looked to me like they were probably East African, and one of them, maybe in her thirties, was gently arranging tan older (maybe fifties or sixties—hard to say, you know what we say) woman’s collar beneath her sweater, freeing it from the cardigan’s neck, using both of her hands to jostle it free but also seeming to spend a little more time than necessary, creasing the fold of the collar, the other hand kind of resting on her shoulder, the two of them charring the whole time, sitting there holding each other, nodding, my head twisting toward them like a sunflower as I finished the stairs and walked by, so in love was I with this common flourish of love, this everyday human light.”

This quote demonstrates Gay’s love for humans being humans, for public physical touch, and for love between people. In this essay, Gay is anxiously circling an airport trying to calm himself down. He sees this brief interaction and is reminded of the good in humankind and likens himself to a flower that needs the sunlight of human goodness to survive. The way he describes this incident and includes parenthetical information creates a casual, conversational tone.

“Among the rigidities of my long youth, as I’ve mentioned before, was an overt and committed disavowal of the pretty in myself for obvious and less obvious reasons, probably. But now, adornment in its many guises has become interesting (delightful!) to me not only as a human-animal characteristic but as a non-human-animal one (bowerbirds anyone?), not to mention the ballerina dresses of the peach blossoms and the gobsmack of the neighbor’s lilies in the alley.”

In this quote, Gay takes time to notice the “prettiness” of himself and the world around him. This touches on his growing understanding of masculinity and how his childlike perspectives have shifted. He also uses descriptive language to describe the peach blossoms and uses unusual words, like “gobsmack” to create a mood and tone in his essays.

“Ingrid’s need to share the photo with me as I was walking toward the buffet at Samira, the Afghan place, almost tugging me by the elbow to do so, using her index finger and thumb to zoom into its luminous neck, smiling and looking at it, smiling and looking at me looking at it, me smiling and looking at her looking at it, which is simply called sharing what we love, what we find beautiful, which is an ethics.”

This quote touches on the main theme of humans being humans. He captures a very human interaction and considers it both a delight and an ethic to share the things one loves. He describes this interaction in detail, capturing their location and Ingrid’s childlike excitement, making the scene grounded and easy to picture.

“I was so flabbergasted by the endurance of love and delight incited by this child to whom I presume none of these people was related, a love and delight that seemed analogous to the one that makes some people struggle not to eat the faces of babies, that I found myself, despite the very engrossing book I was reading about something horrible, laughing out loud and babbling with them and convinced again of something deeply good in us.”

Gay focuses again on the beauty of humans being humans in this essay about a toddler walking up and down the aisle of his airplane. He delights in the joy of the people around him and finds proof of the goodness in humankind.

“I wonder if this impulse to share, the urge to elbow your neighbor, who maybe was not even your neighbor until the bird flew between you up into the pipes and rafters you did not notice until you followed the bird there, is also among the qualities of delight? And further, I wonder if this impulse suggests—and this is just a hypothesis, though I suspect there is enough evidence to make it a theorem—that our delight grows as we share it.”

In this quote, Gay highlights how joy and delight grow when shared. He also mentions the connectedness of humans, calling the stranger next to him in the airport his neighbor while acknowledging that the delight—the bird flying between them—is what connected them. Just because two people are strangers doesn’t make them enemies, and it is in sharing delight that we acknowledge our sameness.

“I suspect this statue-adorning impulse, whether or not we know who the public figure is, is evidence, more evidence, that our inclination, our nature, is to communicate the beautiful and the fragrant however we can. To make of the world a bouquet. Or a vase.”

In this quote, Gay again highlights the base good of humanity and how dedicated people are to make the space around them beautiful. In this essay, “Flowers in the Hands of Statues,” Gay laments how many statues hold guns, but celebrates when he sees statues that have been augmented with flowers, coins, or fruit. He takes these things to be indications of shared humanity and shared love of beauty. Again, people do not need to know each other personally to bear witness together and share in each other’s joy.

“It is not too much to say, and the older I get the more I understand it’s really not too much to say, that he was trying to keep us alive physically and psychically by inuring us to the many registers of hatred, overt and subtle, leveled at black people. He was trying to make our blackness, or the idea of our blackness, invisible, which he must have known was not quite possible.”

In this essay, Gay recounts how often he was corrected during his childhood. Though he didn’t understand why his parents, especially his father, were so strict, as an adult he understands that his father was trying to protect Gay and his brother from how many people viewed Black people. This touches on the theme of Gay’s Experience as a Black Man in the United States, and highlights the casual and systemic racism against Black people, and how Black people must think to survive.

“When we got bumpy I put my hand on the li’l guy’s container, careful not to snap another arm off. And when we landed, and the pilot put the brakes on hard, my arm reflexively went across the seat, holding the li’l guy in place, the way my dad’s arm would when he had to brake hard in that car without seatbelts to speak of, in one of my very favorite gestures in the encyclopedia of human gestures.”

This quote reemphasizes Gay’s delight in humanity, human gestures, and physical touch. In this essay, “Tomato on Board,” Gay is carrying a tomato plant through an airport and onto a plane. He is surprised by the number of smiles the tomato receives and begins treating it like a baby, protecting it in the same way Gay’s father protected him. This essay ends on a nostalgic note remembering Gay’s father.

“One of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness.”

This quote is one of the few times Gay forwardly addresses the way popular culture approaches Black people. The way media represents Black families through television has affected Gay’s experience as a Black man and impacts the way he views other Black people and families. He takes a stand against this representation by writing The Book of Delights which links his Blackness to joy and delight instead of suffering.

“And after the discovering, and the uncovering, choosing which ones to replant, and replant, and replant, and replant, and replant, and replant, until there was the long red kind I’m brushing the soil from. Until the squat kind piling up at the bottom of the basket. It was a kindness. They are our family.”

This quote highlights Gay’s love of gardening and his belief in the interconnectedness of all things. He takes delight in how much thought and effort went into the history of the carrots he is now harvesting. His repetition of the word “replant” also demonstrates his poetic writing style and the cyclical nature of life.

“She laughs and holds the kitchen table lest she fall from her chair telling the story. She gasps and cries a little bit. She is accepting, it seems, what she is: one of the varieties of light.”

In this essay, Gay contrasts the mother he knew as a child, who was strict, to the 76-year-old woman in front of him, who can laugh at herself and the snot running down her face. This quote highlights how people’s perspectives shift over time and how one’s adult perspective is very different from their childhood perspective. As one accepts their humanity and mortality, they can find joy.

“Then it is, too, a kind of grownness by which I see three squares of light on my wall, the shadow of a tree trembling in two of them, and hear the train going by and feel no panic or despair, feel no sense of condemnation or doom or horrible alignment, but simply observe the signs—light and song—for what they are—light and song.”

This quote highlights Gay’s understanding of growth. Many essays have contrasted his childish perspectives with his adult perspectives. Without providing a specific story or example, Gay demonstrates how his life has changed over the years and how he has learned to take things as they come and find peace in each moment.