Demanding Pleasures
August 06, 2025 at 01:14AMEach Lydia Davis story feels irreducible, exactly defined. Her writing style seems less shaped by some idiosyncrasy of voice or structure than by a resolve to find the essential word, phrase, or image—a resolve that takes her far beyond most stylists and into the complex simplicity of someone like Samuel Beckett. (Like Beckett, she’s also a riot, so long as you’re in the right audience.) I haven’t yet read the interview that unfurls Davis’s motivations for writing; it feels wrong, to me, to not receive that gift in Davis’s own hand. Now we have it, via a characteristically sharp Harper’s essay that thrums with her wit and attention.
I wrote a story called “The Cows.” I did not write it with any intention. I did not even write it all at once—it took three years to accumulate. The way it originated was as simple as looking out the window, or standing by the road looking across the road, and observing the cows, who, over the years, started by being three heifers, then grew up, two of them bearing one calf each. After the two calves were adults, they were taken away. I occasionally wrote down what I saw. After three years, I had more than eighty observations. I made a little book of it, with accompanying photos. Only later did I realize that the emotions involved in this story were not only my various forms of pleasure and sometimes amusement or sympathy as I watched the positions and behaviors of the cows and their calves, as well as the demanding pleasure of setting down my observations of them, but also my pain and sorrow over the treatment of most cows in the world. I could see what these particular cows, my neighbor cows, preferred when given the almost complete freedom they had—to go in and out of the open door of their barn, to drink from a bathtub by the fence, to walk to a particular spot in their large field, in winter to stand in the snow, broadside to the warm sun. Even when they were larger than their mothers, the calves went on nursing now and then, coming over for a few tugs at the teat, and their mothers stood still and waited for them to be done. All I wanted to do, for my own satisfaction in writing down my observations, was to portray exactly the way these cows looked and what they did, black on green or white or tan, in the field. But maybe I was also relishing their freedom to make their choices.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/05/lydia-davis-observation-writing-cows/
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