Ms. Hen reviews The Book of Delights

 

The Book of Delights

Ross Gay

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

2019

Ms. Hen first heard of this book from a podcast on This American Life. She does not listen to a lot of podcasts, because she prefers to read or listen to music, but she was on a road trip and needed to kill time. She was delighted by all the stories on this podcast, and it made her curious about the book. The link for the podcast is here: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/692/the-show-of-delights

This is a collection of essays about cultivating the idea of delight. The author is delighted with almost everything he sees, and since Ms. Hen has heard this podcast, and read this book, she is attempting to find delight as well. Ms. Hen thinks that she is delightful herself, but she struggles with others' lack of delight at times, which is not delightful.

The author talks about the joy of writing by hand, which Ms. Hen understands for some people can be a pleasure. Ms. Hen does not like writing by hand, because her hands get more tired that way, but people have their own sense of delight.

Ms. Hen learned of the term "negreeting," in this book. It's a way that Black people acknowledge other Black people, by inferring that they know what it's like to live in this world as themselves. Ms. Hen thinks that there are other types of this communication, between marginalized people, or people who look and talk the same.

In the essay entitled "Touched," the author talks about how people who are seen as touched are a little bit off, but they might be enjoying themselves in a way that nobody understands. Some people might think that Ms. Hen is touched, because she a hen who writes a blog, but that's okay, because she has accepted that she is different. Ms. Hen is delighted that she sees the world in a different way than other people, and she does not care what people think of her.

One of the things that delights Ms. Hen right now is the Cow Parade in Boston. There are life-size cows painted all over the city, which is a fundraiser for the Jimmy Fund. Ms. Hen has been walking all over, looking for cows, taking pictures of herself on them. She wonders how people walk by these cows and are not delighted, but she thinks that is their own problem. 

Ms. Hen loves the idea of cultivating delight, because almost anything can be delightful, if we want it to be. The world can be terrible, and completely awful, but Ms. Hen thinks that finding delight is a practice, similar to yoga, in which a person exercises their delight muscle, and life can seem a little bit brighter.