Start looking for joy and you’ll spot it everywhere — sort of. If it’s not the clickbait asking readers “what tv series bring you joy?”, it’s the ever-circulating, James Baldwin-attributed quote, admonishing us to “trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”
Where Baldwin wrote or said this, no one bothers to confirm. But aphorisms on joy catch my attention because, like this one, they often mention sorrow or sadness in the same breath. For something supposedly available in everything from tv series to jewelry1, and KonMari minimalism-as-joy-ignition notwithstanding, we speak about joy in a way that also hints at it being heavier than happiness, more elusive, more meaningful. And we spend a lot of time — or money — trying to find it.
Published just a few years ago, Ross Gay’s “The Book of Delights” is already required reading for sensitive literary types and moms-who-meditate alike. (Personally, I think it should be on the syllabus of life’s curriculum for everyone.)
The book's conceit is the “essayette”: short personal essays that collectively form what the author calls a “treatise” on delight. 38. Baby, Baby, Baby. 40. Giving My Body to the Cause. 54. Public Lying Down. 93. Reckless Air Quotes. They’re not always cheerful, but the essays are attentive and the writing is buoyant — there’s at least one essayette that is a single run-on sentence. And even the topics that ricochet into pain or frustration2 have a seed of observation, reflection, or connection.3
Gay began this project on his birthday. I imagine that it felt like a natural time to start, inviting as birthdays are to delights of all shapes and stripes. Two years running, to mark my own birthday, I’ve recorded myself reading poetry aloud (mine and others’) and eating cake.
As promised, here is the 2022 setlist of other poets’ works, including links to read the poems for yourself.4
Paige Lewis, “You Be You and I’ll Be Busy”
Jonny Teklit, “Let Me Show You”
Joséphine Bacon, “Tu es musique”
There are so many more poems that I wanted to read if time had allowed. I’ve thought about doing regular readings, but I suspect the infrequency is part of the joy. All of the sad days when I don’t eat cake and declaim poems are redeemed on my birthday.
Anyone who spent time on Tumblr in the early 2000s probably scrolled past an image with Frida Kahlo’s famous last words set in an unsophisticated font:
Espero alegre la salida y espero no volver jamás
I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.
Again: a line that talks of hope and joy, but gestures toward suffering.5 If Kahlo’s exit is joyful because she would be released from intense, years-long chronic pain, then isn’t the joy pre-determined? Could fear of death — sustained fear being a kind of self-imposed suffering — interrupt her hoped-for joy? Either way, joy finds its counterpart in suffering: the presence of one infers the other.
Delight 14. “Joy is Such a Human Madness” is titled after Zadie Smith, who writes of a similar feeling:
If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.
Some experiences are too quotidian to be joyful, then. Maybe it’s not a daily feeling—maybe true joy really is looped around the exit, like a string tied to a doorknob at one end and a wiggly tooth at the other.
Sukkot is z’man simchateinu, or “the season of our joy.” The Jewish high holiday, like many other facets of Judeo-Christian tradition, also places joy hand-in-hand with suffering, grounded in an awareness of the tantalizing possibility of salvation from pain. Joy is available; it simply requires a sacrificial spirit.
The depth of the joy also grows out of its relationship to Yom Kippur. Sukkot comes just four days after Yom Kippur, the most ascetic, self-denying, guilt-ridden, awesome holy day of the Jewish year. On the Day of Atonement, Jews reenact their own death, only to be restored to life in the resolution of the day. Only those who know the fragility of life can truly appreciate the full preciousness of every moment. The release from Yom Kippur leads to the extraordinary outburst of life that is Sukkot.
- Rabbi Mark Greenspan, Why Sukkot is Called Z’man Simchateinu
A reenactment of death as a necessary precedent to joy — Zadie Smith might be right to decline an extra allotment of such experiences. Frida Kahlo hoped for a one-way ticket out of life, a final season of her joy, after many years of waiting for restoration. Perhaps this joy is too powerful for the day-to-day.
Or perhaps, this joy is the only way to get through the days. Maybe suffering, practicing for death, trains us to know joy, so that we’re able to go hopefully through the exit. Ross Gay, too, writes of the way that lives end, all lives, and of “terror and delight sitting next to each other,” and of how our bodies might each contain a wilderness of sorrows.
“Is sorrow the true wild?” he asks, and goes on:
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.I’m saying: What if that is joy?
I talked during my birthday reading about Jonny Teklit’s poem and how captivating I find his idea of a joy that returns one to their own body after the world has intervened with “some new horror to snatch the breath.” The crusade of suffering that seems to define human existence does snatch away the breath — it’s a perpetual death. It disembodies us. And then joy catapults us back: to life, to our bodies, to our present moment, to brightness and raucousness.
all of these things make of me a rainstorm in the ocean, which is to say look at how I return to myself
Teklit’s “little joys,” Gay’s delights, Smith’s pleasures, Kahlo’s hope — we look around the world for things to love, ostensibly to disprove the horror but really, I think, to practise looking for an experience of the world in which our suffering is paused. This is, perhaps, the one part that Marie Kondo gets right: her tidying up asks us to look carefully at our belongings and our responses to them. And looking is a way to witness. Witnessing each other is how we join ourselves together. In the joining of our sorrows, they are annihilated and made anew; that death surges with an extraordinary outburst of life. Joy isn’t something we have to find — it’s made in us. It resounds.
One morning late last year, before I had yet thought much about any of this, I watched the sun come up and angle its low, winter light across the heads of trees. Each leaf was shivering, and the frost made them all sparkle. I wrote a poem about it later, and as an afterthought, I wrote this:
I am a ringing
bowl struck with jostling sorrows
remind me, please, that this is also joy
Questions to Ask of the person behind the curtain.
I’m electing not to link to findyourjoytoday.com and its wide range of bracelets.
See: 45. Microgentrification: WE BUY GOLD, in which the author — a black man — is asked not to sit and drink coffee in front of a pawn shop because he might “scare the customers.”
I wrote this paragraph and then proceeded to read an essay in the book that made this authorial sentiment clearly known. Please collude with me in pretending that it’s a wildly original observation I made.
In the latter two cases, you can listen to recordings of the poets reading their own work; you can also find the version of Joséphine Bacon’s poem in Innu-aimun, her Algonquian language, and a recording of her reading in that language as well.
Unlike the Baldwin quote, this line is documented — it’s from Frida Kahlo’s diary.