The Book of Delights

In this short essay, Gay describes the way a new friend uses air quotes boldly to indicate emphasis, rather than to attribute what someone might have said. This friend uses air quotes so frequently and extravagantly that Gay thinks of it as a dance characteristic of this friend.

On Gay’s mother’s 76th birthday, he remembers the time she went to the supermarket after getting oral surgery to buy soup. After leaving the store, she saw she has a line of snot dripping from her nose into her mouth which she couldn’t feel due to the numbing agent used in her surgery. Gay’s mother is one of the most proper, self-berating people he knows. In the past, she would have used this embarrassment to beat herself up and never return to the grocery store. Now, however, she laughs hard telling the story. Gay thinks she is finally accepting that she is a variety of light.

Gay studies the backboard of a basketball hoop, made of weathered wood dyed gray, maroon, and mauve by time. The backboard reminds him of paintings by Rothko, who thought viewers of his paintings should cry upon seeing them because of the tragedy within the painting. When Gay visited a museum of Rothko’s works, he tried to cry, but couldn’t. Similarly, the backboard makes Gay happy just like a failed Rothko painting.

While Gay and a friend are shooting hoops at a public basketball court in Marfa, a young man challenges them to a two on two. Gay and his friend beat the other two easily, saying that it is irrelevant that the youths are only 12 years old because they have the advantage of home court and a one-person audience of a little girl. When one of the boys comments that they are being beat, the little girl replies, “I’d hope so. They’re grown men” (213).

While walking in Marfa, Gay is surprised by how strongly he feels love and nostalgia after seeing a carport. He finds carports to be interesting, vulnerable structures and wonders what carports and garages indicate about class. He wonders if carports were features in Verndale or Youngstown, places he spent a lot of time there as a child because he feels nostalgic about them. He then remarks how closely related delight and nostalgia, which he calls existential loneliness, are related. He ends the essay by listing other architectural features he finds delight in, starting with breakfast nooks and window seats.

In this essay, Gay tries to distinguish how good and delightful things are not always related. He uses Jamaica Kincaid’s work as an example. Her work is very important and good to him but is not always delightful. Her work shows how one’s comfort is often dependent on the agony of others, which does not delight Gay. However, his delight is amplified when reading a passage in her work My Garden (Book): about a raccoon that has been eating her squash. She wants to drown the raccoon but is convinced to set it free by her family. This reminds Gay of the situation he was in with a groundhog named Greg. In the passage, Kincaid calls the no-kill trap she uses to catch the raccoon “a pantywaist contraption,” which makes Gay laugh aloud and nourishes his delight.

While in Marfa, Gay sees a flowering bush he doesn’t recognize surrounded by all-black bumblebees. The bees do the same things as their striped cousins and remind Gay of the back corner of his garden where the bees gather to pollinate his plants. He remembers one of the delights of his childhood, sucking the sweetness from honeysuckle flowers. Once, he discovered he could suck the flavor from the flowers without risking breaking the stamen by plucking the stopper at the bottom of the bloom.

Gay believes that a part of being grown is enduring some emotional turmoil that brings one to the brink and then hopefully stepping away from that brink. He considers another aspect of being grown to study the squares of light on his bedroom wall, the shadow of a tree, and the sound of a train without feeling panic or despair. He considers this sense of relief to be the water that feeds delight.

Gay looks at himself in the mirror while rubbing coconut oil all over his body after the shower. He studies the light and dark variations of his skin and watches in the mirror as he rubs the oil into his stomach and chest by hugging himself. He thinks of all the bodies he holds within his current body, including his strongest self, his 12-year-old self, and his baby self. He thinks it is easy to think of himself as his baby self while oiling his body like this and says that if one decides (which may be difficult) they can picture rubbing their baby self in oil until they shine.

On his 43rd birthday, Gay records many things that delight him throughout the day: a good cup of coffee, colorful flowers, a black cat, kids in a café playing a board game, a funny joke, and birthday cards. In one of the birthday cards, Gay’s friend explains that the word “delight” means “out from light” and is connected to the words delectable and delicious. Despite spending a year studying delight, Gay didn’t know this. Studying delight is cultivation, which makes it a garden.

He feels the need to summarize what he has learned in this year-long project but doesn’t have anything to summarize. It is simply the day of his birth. He ends the essay by telling the story of his friend Pat, whose mother lived in a village in the Philippines that was devastated by a typhoon. Out of all the wreckage, stacked in a surviving gazebo, were all the doors.