Chapter 14 of The Book of Delights is called "Joy is Such a Human Madness."
First, here is a clip of Ross Gay reading the second part of this chapter: https://onbeing.org/blog/joy-is-such-a-human-madness/
In this essayette, Gay has a lot of literary allusions. Here are some of those:
Zadie Smith's "Joy"-- see iCollege for this essay.
Kenzaburō Ōe's raising of a child with disabilities. See his comments in this article in The Guardian.
Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (film clip) that also plays Kronos Quartet's "The Beatitudes"
Philip Levine's "Animals Are Passing from our Lives"
Rainer Rilke's "The First Elegy" from Duino Elegies
Romantic ideas of horror and the sublime
Edmund Burke's Sublime (short explanation) from A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful
the angel of annihilation (or Azrael in the three Abrahamic religions)
Other references worth thinking about: Hollywood culture, Auschwitz, and wilderness