Digging into The Marginalian

On a whim…

The article at the link — Maria Popova’s February 17, 2020 piece on The Marginalian (then still echoing Brain Pickings) — centers on the 100th and final “essayette” in Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights (2019). Titled around the theme of “Grown,” it offers Gay’s hard-won definition of mature adulthood.

Here is the heart of it:

“I suspect it is simply a feature of being an adult, what I will call being grown, or a grown person, to have endured some variety of thorough emotional turmoil, to have made your way to the brink, and, if you’re lucky, to have stepped back from it — if not permanently, then for some time, or time to time. 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. And, knowing what I have felt before, and might feel again, feel a sense of relief, which is cousin to, or rather, water to, delight.”

Popova frames this as the difficult beauty of true grownness (echoing Toni Morrison’s 2004 Wellesley address and Maya Angelou’s reflections on retaining inner innocence while aging). It is not the absence of turmoil but the capacity, after having been to the brink, to meet ordinary phenomena with clear, non-reactive presence — relief that waters delight. The piece sits within Gay’s larger yearlong experiment: each day from his 42nd to 43rd birthday, he wrote one short “essayette” on a specific delight encountered that day.

The Daily Practice: Building the “Delight Muscle”

Gay’s project was never passive logging. It was active cultivation. In Popova’s companion piece on the full book, Gay describes developing a “delight radar” or “delight muscle”: the more you study and notice delight, the more there is to study. Delight grows when shared — much like love and joy. Etymologically, “delight” carries the sense of “out from light”; attention acts like sunshine turning quiet dew-drops into gold.

This practice braids supreme attentiveness (staring into oregano blooms in his community garden) with creative inattention or fleeting intensities. Themes recur: his mother, racism, kindness, politics, pop music, books, dreams, public space, and the garden itself. Specific sensory delights — ripe loquats accidentally pilfered on a walk in Italy, wild fennel, a field of sunflowers, honeybees felt vibrating in the body, the sun as a guiding hand — sit alongside meta-delights: the sheer improbable fact of one’s existence (“my white mother had never even met a black guy!”), pleasant public physical interactions with strangers (high-fives, a trash-truck worker smacking his arm), and the ethics of sharing what one loves.

Key connections here:

• Attention as discipline and generosity — akin to Mary Oliver’s imperative (“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it”) and Popova’s frequent returns to attentive presence as antidote to hurry and despair.

• Hermann Hesse (explicitly invoked by Popova): the “small joys” that require time and acute noticing, set against consumerist “hurry-hurry.”

• Wendell Berry: elemental pleasures “to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all” — delight as countercultural resistance.

Mycelial Joy: Interconnection Through Grief and Care

Gay repeatedly figures joy and delight as relational and underground. In later reflections and Inciting Joy, he speaks of “luminous, mycelial tethers between us,” “the mostly invisible, the underground union between us,” and the image of sinking a spoon into “the death between us” only to find it teeming with life. Joy is not refuge from sorrow but what “effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks.” It is “an entering and a joining with the terrible.” Joining sorrows can itself be a form of joy — an annihilation of separateness.

The garden is both literal site and metaphor: supreme attentiveness and a space where trees (and people) support one another through subterranean networks. This ecological imagination links delight to care, mortality, and belonging — not to institutions or markets, but to each other and the living world.

Traced connections:

• Ecology and systems: Mycorrhizal networks (trees sharing nutrients underground) as model for human interconnection — parallels systems thinking, relational ontologies, and Indigenous knowledge traditions.

• Engaged Buddhism / mindfulness traditions (e.g., Tricycle conversations with Gay): delight as practice that restructures attention, inextricable from mortality and the capacity to care; a radical, necessary discipline amid suffering.

• Broader joy-grief literature: Zadie Smith, Rilke, and Romantic threads (joy as encounter with the terrible) that Popova weaves in.

Grownness, the Brink, and Post-Turmoil Presence

The specific “Grown” essayette crystallizes what the daily practice makes possible. Having gone to the emotional brink and returned (or returned enough), one can observe “light and song” without panic, condemnation, or doom — and feel relief that opens into delight. This is mature presence: not denial of history or pain, but freedom from being hijacked by it in the moment of perception.

Popova complements this with May Sarton on illumination within depression and Alain de Botton on existential maturity. It resonates with recovery arcs (return from brink with new capacity for presence), spiritual “dark night” or awakening narratives (light after ordeal), and psychological integration (post-traumatic growth, Jungian processes of holding tension until something new emerges).

Further traces:

• Resistance and ethics: Gay’s delights are not naïve. They occur amid racism, toxic masculinity, ecological and psychic violence of consumer culture, and personal loss. Finding and sharing delight becomes subversive — a refusal to relinquish inner capacity for wonder. (Parallels to “rest as resistance” movements; Gay’s own insistence on joy as calling even in pain.)

• Whitman lineage: Gay the poet (see Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude) inherits Whitman’s catalogues of abundance, reverence for the material and multitudinous world, and democratic spirit. His “essayettes” are prose-poetic acts of noticing the particular.

• Performance and amplification: Bill T. Jones’s Universe in Verse rendering of Gay’s “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be” extends the delight-sharing into embodied, communal space.

Webs of Attention Across Time

Popova’s Marginalian project itself forms part of the web: repeated returns to Hesse’s small joys, Berry’s attentive pleasures as resistance, Oliver’s astonishment, Morrison and Angelou on difficult beauty and retained innocence. Gay picks up a century after Hesse and continues the work of willful gladness in a different register — one that explicitly includes race, body, public space, grief, and ecology.

The practice is portable. Daily micro-essays on what delights, what connects, what reveals light and song after having known the brink — this builds the muscle. It turns ordinary noticing into evidence of interconnection and life wanting to live. It is, in Gay’s later phrasing, “the pleasurable evidence of connection.”

For a writer and witness documenting presence, ordinary voices, family roots, service in daily rhythms, and the alchemy of awakening after personal and collective brinks, these threads run close: the relief that waters delight; the garden of attentions (literal or metaphoric); mycelial tethers of care and legacy; sharing what one notices as an ethics and a form of resistance to despair or abstraction. The “light and song” Gay observes without panic can be literal (music, sunlight, birdsong) or metaphoric (moments of clarity, connection, grace).

Tracing these connections is itself a delight — following luminous, underground threads across poets, gardeners, essayists, philosophers of attention, and practitioners of care. The more one studies them, the more there is to study. And the sharing, as Gay learned, makes the delight grow.