Reflections

I'm delighted that the selection committee chose Inciting Joy. Gay’s stories and reflections challenge us to be open to moments of joy, even when we may be struggling, and to allow these moments to help sustain us. I look forward to reading this work with our students, faculty, and staff, and to the many conversations about what it means to belong at BU. Together, let us find joy during a time of rapid change.

What I appreciate the most about Inciting Joy is its refusal to define joy too narrowly. Ross Gay finds it in gardening, friendships, in music and memory, in moments of celebration and moments of sorrow. His essays suggest that joy is less a destination than a way of paying attention. It’s a practice of noticing what sustains us and connects us to one another. For me, Gay’s reflections on gardening are especially resonant. A garden asks us to invest in a future we cannot fully control, to nurture growth we may never entirely witness, and to find meaning in the act of tending itself. College is not unlike that. It is a season of planting and becoming. Like a well-tended garden, a university community flourishes when people invest in one another, remain open to surprise and create space for growth. My hope is that every reader finds something in these pages that takes root. The collection is wide enough to meet us in different places, and generous enough to leave us changed in ways we may not immediately recognize.

Right from the novel’s outset, Samantha Harvey weaves an extraordinarily focused meditation on the power of perspective to illuminate a discussion on the meanings of life and the impacts of human achievement—and I just became filled with the excitement at the prospect of connecting Orbital’s stories with the experiences and aspirations that follow each of us into university life. Touching on technology and the arts and politics and philosophy, the novel offers countless entry points and ample room for dialogue around its insights. Harvey moves between reflections on grief, reckoning, belief, maturity, and sustainability seamlessly—but without favoritism and judgment. In doing so, she leaves space that validates the experiences of those embarking on journeys of learning and coming to their own reasoned conclusions and awareness. That journey of learning and discovery is at the heart of university life.

Among the novel’s many powerful passages, one that neatly illustrates what I love so much about the text takes place in “Orbit 5, ascending”: Anton, a Russian cosmonaut, is reflecting on Michael Collins’s famous picture of the Earth from the Apollo 11 moon landing and the familiar observation that it is the only image ever taken that includes every living person except one, the photographer. But Anton sees this interpretation as fully backward: “The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph is the photographer himself…. In that sense...he is really the only human presence it contains.” Moments like these permeate the novel and invite the reader to celebrate the opportunities to make meaning of our relationships to each other and to the world when we seek new vantage points. For the incoming class of 2029, your university experience will overflow with such opportunities. Orbital invites us all to complement our collective drive with reflection and our ambitions with consideration of what it is all for. I’m thrilled for our community to embark on a new set of shared experiences this coming year and for Orbital to serve as a lingua franca to all of the above.

Throughout Inciting Joy, Ross Gay offers a wide-ranging invitation to pay attention — to all the different ways that joy moves through our lives, woven in and around and mixed up in the moments of chaos, sadness, bliss, and change. His exploration is grounded in the power of observing with gratitude the small moments of beauty, laughter, and community that are so easy to let slip by unnoticed. Many times while reading, I was struck by a specific example or nuanced story, but perhaps most so in the sixth incitement, when Gay writes of a friend who makes him laugh with complete abandon, and he offers the reader a quiet and earnest wish: 'I hope you have a friend like Dave.' That line stayed with me long after I closed the book, and I found myself wanting to extend it to every student who will read these essays. I hope our students will find reflections of meaningful experiences in their own lives as they read: that they'll find the incitement of joy through laughter with friends they make here at BU and that they'll discover it in the 'orchard' of our campus by giving back and trying something new with strangers-turned-community. Joy, Gay reminds us, is not something reserved for the easy days. It is something to be tended, noticed, and incited, in the big moments and the small ones, and sometimes most powerfully in the ones that catch you entirely off guard.