Luscious Things

by Jennie Rose Halperin

How much pleasure there is in just sitting around, writing, eating and reading. How nice it is to contemplate new things for a change, and how good it would be to do that every day. 

—Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries is a catalog collected from her journals over the past 15 years, sorted sentence by sentence in alphabetical order and only lightly edited. Many of the characters from her works of autofiction are scattered through the text, so when I read it in March it felt like dropping in on a group of old friends. It’s a slow read, non-narrative, and often confusing. But I still loved it and sank into it like a warm bath, giving in to Heti’s writing and letting her life’s work wash over me.

Unlike Heti, I’ve never been disciplined about diarying, but this year I decided to take a cue from poet Ross Gay’s wonderful The Book of Delights, a diary of lyric essays on “delights,” which he kept for an entire year. It’s a strange, irreverent collection of memories with titles like, “That’s Some Bambi Shit.” “Sharing a Bag.” “Kombucha in a Mid-century Glass.” “Micro-gentrification: WE BUY GOLD.” “The Sanctity of Trains.” 

–did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.

Following Gay’s example, I thought it would be a useful exercise to transcribe the delightful every day myself, in order to invite more pleasure into my life.

It was such a terrible year in world events that this practice sometimes felt self-indulgent, but another book I read this year, Becca Rothstein’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, helped me quiet that feeling.