![]() By the time he finishes the blue prints, however, he doesn't have the money to build the house, so it becomes only a dream, one that he shares with a local hunter who randomly comes by-except that the narrator can't understand the hunter's country accent and the hunter can't understand the narrator's city accent. The narrator sacrifices so much of his life to purchase the land, which has a ramshackle, practically uninhabitable house on it, and he proceeds to draw up extravagant blue prints-his work of art. In this case, the narrator wants to build the house of his dreams on a fairly abject piece of land that he sees beauty in. ![]() "So I'm just thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like $1,000, and how you can come out with an old shirt."Īnother of my favorites in this collection is "The House Plans," an odd fable of sorts that also strives to arrive at a tangible value for a pursuit. The story reaches this tragic epiphany, but then, to support the cliche that life is nothing but a cruel joke, Davis ends with this denoument. So the question is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't." "You can't measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. Pain has to be part of the equation, but the recognition of it as inherent in the pleasures of relations-whether it's a pet, a child, or a lover-devastate the entire notion of trying to make this existential equation make sense. His tallies hit a wall when he reckons with the inevitable pain of the affair. It's a laughable exercise to try to quantify such an experience, of course, but the narrator's project also begs many questions as he recounts the number of tendernesses, the beautiful and precious moments that add nothing to economic outcomes or better the world in any tangible way. "You're with each other all day long and it keeps happening, the touches and smiles, and it all adds up." Soon he breaks down the cost to $6 an hour as he tallies up all of those times when the lover is present or absent, because "you can't forget and it's all inside you all the time." Initially, he figures that they had sex once a day, eight times total, so he spent $100 each time, or $50 an hour since they stayed in bed for two hours, an experience that he decides is expensive.īut he goes further-the cost must include the small moments as well. ![]() In the process of evaluating the cost, he breaks down the love affair, and arrives at a surprising conclusion. ![]() It's a simple story on the surface: the narrator is obsessively trying to quantify eight days of love, in which he spent approximately $800. Take "Break It Down," the story that gives the title to her 1976 collection of short stories. They are so short, after all, and you can page through one piece after another almost as if you're reading a joke book.īut the quirky facade is deceptive, and even the humor often causes a chill of tragic recognition. You might be tempted to read Lydia Davis's stories in passing, to treat them as quirky, funny entertainments. ![]()
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