There’s a word in these lines from Gilbert’s poem “A Brief for the Defense” that stops me: “stubbornness.” Not openness, not willingness, not even bravery. Stubbornness. He treats gladness as something that must be insisted upon, held fast against a current that would sweep it off. The world is a ruthless furnace. And yet delight exists within it, and we are somehow obligated to accept it when it comes.

The distinction he draws between pleasure and delight feels surgically precise. Pleasure can be obtained, replicated, optimized. It asks little of us. Delight is rarer and stranger, tending to arrive when we are genuinely present to something beyond ourselves, when the making or the seeing opens a gap we didn’t plan for. It carries risk because it requires remaining vulnerable enough to be surprised, which means remaining vulnerable enough to be disappointed, to find that what we’ve made falls short of what we imagined.

Much of the conversation surrounding creative work right now carries an undertone of unease. We sense the ground shifting and wonder whether it will hold. In such a climate, Gilbert’s insistence on delight carries particular weight. The risk he names goes deeper than choosing joy over cynicism. It includes continuing to invest ourselves fully in the act of making when the meaning of that investment is genuinely uncertain. Stubbornness, in his formulation, becomes a kind of faith exercised without guarantees. We keep returning to the desk, the bench, the instrument, the page, because something there has always answered us. Whether we can name what that something is, and whether it persists in a world rapidly rearranging itself around us, we may not know. But delight, when it comes, has a way of making the question feel less urgent.