by Lydia Davis
She folds up the letter and puts it back in the envelope, lays it on her chest with her hand on top of it, closes her eyes, and after a while, with the light still on, begins to fall asleep. Half dreaming, she thinks that something of his smell may still be in the paper and she wakes up. She takes the paper out of the envelope and unfolds it and breathes deeply the wide white margin at the bottom of the page. Nothing. Then the poem, and she thinks she can smell something there, though she is probably smelling only the ink.
Extracts from a Life
Childhood
I was brought up in the violin factory, and when I had a fight with my brothers and sisters we even used to hit one another with violins.
If you think of something, do it
Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.”
The Japanese poet Issa
As a child I was taught to recite the haiku of the Japanese poet Issa, and I have never forgotten them.
Ah, my old home town,
Dumplings that they used to make,
Snow in springtime, too.
Grown-ups
I cannot live without children. But I love grown-ups too, because I feel a great sympathy for them—“After all, these people too must die.”
My meeting with Tolstoy
One day, as usual, I set off for my father’s violin factory, where a thousand people were employed. I entered the office, discovered an English typewriter, and started punching the keys.
Just then the chief of the export department came in. “Master Shinichi!”
I lied and said I had merely been touching the keys.
“I see,” he replied simply.
Coward, I thought. Why did I dissemble?
I went to a bookstore, filled with severe anger against myself. Fate led me to a copy of Tolstoy’s Diary. I opened it at random. “To deceive oneself is worse than to deceive others.” These harsh words pierced me to the core.
Several years later when, at twenty-three, I went to Germany to study, the book went with me in my pocket.
A little episode
Here follows a little episode of self-praise.
I was then under the strong influence of Tolstoy.
It was in 1919. I received an unexpected letter in early spring inviting me to join an expedition for biological research. The expedition party on board numbered thirty.
At that time I was inseparable from my violin. It had become a part of me.
Our ship circled the islands. While we walked side by side on the beach, we discovered a most unusual patch of moss of reddish-cobalt color growing high up a sheer cliff.
“I very badly wish to have some of that moss,” said Professor Emoto, looking up anxiously.
“I will get it for you from here,” I boasted, and borrowed a small scoop from a research member.
It turned out to be situated much higher than expected. Heavens! I thought.
I threw the scoop, under the scrutiny of the whole party.
“Oh, wonderful marvelous!” they cried.
As I listened to their applause, I vowed in my heart never again to do such a foolish thing.
I have learned what art really is
Art is not in some far-off place.
Dr. Einstein was my guardian
I took lodgings in the house of a gray-haired widow and her elderly maid. Both the landlady and the maid were hard of hearing so they did not complain no matter how loudly I practiced the violin.
“I shall no longer be able to look after you,” said Dr. M., a professor of medicine, “and so I have asked a friend of mine to keep an eye on you.” The friend turned out to be Dr. Albert Einstein, who later developed the theory of relativity.
A maestro who performed too well
Eintein’s specialties, such as the Bach Chaconne, were magnificent. In comparison with his playing, mine, though I tried to play effortlessly and with ease, seemed to me a constant struggle.
“People are all the same, madame”
At a dinner party, an old woman wondered how it was that a Japanese could play the violin in such a way as to convey what was German about Bruch.
After a brief interval, Dr. Einstein said quietly, “People are all the same, madame.”
I was tremendously moved.
I now felt as though I were under direct orders from Mozart
The whole program that evening was Mozart. And during the Clarinet Quintet, something happened to me that had never happened before: I lost the use of my arms. After the performance I tried to clap. My blood burned within me.
That night I couldn’t sleep at all. Mozart had shown me immortal light, and I now felt as though I were under direct orders from Mozart. He expressed his sadness not only with the minor scale but with the major scale as well. Life and death: the inescapable business of nature. Filled with the joy of love, I gave up sadness.
Well done, young man
I was doing what I wanted to do.
Holding his chopsticks in midair, my father looked at me with a sparkle in his eye. “Well done, Shinichi!”
The House Plans
The land was pointed out to me from the road, which ran along the side of the hill above it, and right away I wanted to buy it. If the agent had spoken to me of disadvantages, I would not have heard him at that moment. I was numbed by the beauty of what I saw: a long valley of blood-red vineyards, half flooded with late summer rain; in the distance, yellow fields choked with weeds and thistles and behind them a forest covering a hillside; in the middle of the valley, higher than the fields, the ruin of a farmhouse: a mulberry tree grew up through the broken stone of its garden wall, and nearby, the shadow of an ancient pear tree lay across the carpet of brown, rotted fruit on the ground.
Leaning against his car, the agent said, “There is one room left intact. Inside, it is filthy. They have had animals there for years.” We walked down to the house.
Dung was thick on the tiles of the floor. I felt the wind through the stones and I saw daylight through the lofty roof. None of this discouraged me. I had the papers drawn up that same day.
I had looked forward for so many years to finding a piece of land and building a house on it that I sometimes felt I had not been brought into the world for any other purpose. Once the desire was born in me, all my energies were bent on satisfying it: the job that I got as soon as I could leave school was tiresome and demoralizing, but it brought me more and more money as my responsibilities grew. In order to spend as little as possible I lived a very uneventful life and resisted making friends or enjoying myself. After many years I had enough money to leave my job and begin looking for land. Real estate agents drove me from one property to another. I saw so many pieces of land that I grew confused and no longer knew just what I was looking for. When at last the valley came into sight below me, I felt I had been relieved of a terrible burden.
While the warmth of summer lay over the land, I was content, living in my majestic and soot-blackened room. I cleaned it up, filled it with furniture, and set up a drawing board in one corner, where I worked on plans for rebuilding the house. Looking up from my work, I would see the sunlight on the olive leaves and be lured outdoors. Walking over the grass by the house, I watched, with the tired, expectant eyes of a man who has lived all his life in the city, magpies running through the thyme and lizards vanishing into the wall. In stormy weather, the cypresses by my window bent before the wind.
Then the autumn chill came down and hunters stalked near my house. The explosion of their rifles filled me with dread. Pipes from a sewage-treatment yard in the next field cracked and let a terrible smell into the air. I built fires in my fireplace and was never warm.
One day my window was darkened by the form of a young hunter. The man was wearing leather and carrying a rifle. After looking at me for a moment, he came to my door and opened it without knocking. He stood in the shadow of the door and stared at me. His eyes were milky blue and his reddish beard hardly concealed his skin. I immediately too
k him for a half-wit and was terrified. He did nothing: after gazing at what was in the room, he shut the door behind him and went away.
I was filled with rage. As though he were strolling around a zoo, this man had come up to my stony little pen and rudely examined me. I fumed and paced around the room. But I was lonely there, out in the country, and he had awakened my curiosity. By the time a few days had gone by, I was anxious to see him.
He came again, and this time he did not hesitate at the door, but walked in, sat down on a chair, and spoke to me. I did not understand his country accent. He repeated one phrase twice and then a third time and still I could only guess at his meaning. When I tried to answer him he had the same trouble understanding my city accent. I gave up and offered him a glass of wine. He refused it. In a diffident sort of way he got up from his chair and ventured to inspect my belongings at closer range. Proceeding from my bookcase around the walls, which were covered with framed prints of houses I particularly liked, some in the Place des Vosges and some in the poor quarters behind Montparnasse, he finally arrived at my drawing board, where he stopped short and stood with his finger in the air, waiting for enlightenment. The fact that I was planning a house, line by line, took him a long while to understand and when he did, he began tracing the walls of each room with his finger, a few inches above the blueprint. When at last he had examined and traced every line, he smiled at me without parting his lips, looking sideways in a rather sly way that I did not understand, and abruptly left me.
Again I was angry, feeling that he had invaded my room and stolen my secrets. Yet when my anger subsided I wanted him to return. He returned the following day, and a few days later he came yet again, though the wind was high. I began to expect him and look forward to his visits. He hunted every morning very early, and several times in the week, after he was finished, he would walk in from the field, where the sun was beginning to color the white clay. His face would gleam and he would be so full of energy that he could hardly contain it: leaping up every few minutes from his chair, he would pace to the door and look out, return to the middle of the room, whistling tunelessly, and sit down again. Slowly this energy would die away, and when it was gone, he would go too. He never accepted anything to eat or drink, and seemed surprised that I would offer it, as though sharing food and drink were an act of great intimacy.
It did not become any easier for us to communicate, but we found more and more things to do together. He helped me prepare for winter by filling the chinks in my walls and stacking wood for the fireplace. After we had worked, we would go out into the fields and the forest. My friend showed me the places he liked to visit—a grove of hawthorns, a rabbit warren, and a cave in the hillside—and though I had only one thing that I could show him, he seemed to find it just as mysterious and absorbing as I did.
Each time he came to see me, we would first go over to my blueprint, where I had added another room or increased the size of my study. There were always changes to show him, because I was never done improving my plan and worked on it almost every hour. Sometimes, now, he would pick up my pencil and awkwardly sketch in something that would not have occurred to me: a smokehouse or a root cellar.
But the excitement of the plan as well as the pleasure of having a friend were blinding me to a dreadful fact: the longer I lived on my land, letting the time slip by, the more the possibility of building the house faded. My money was trickling away and my dream was going with it. In the village, far from any marketplace, the price of food was double what it had been in the city. Thin as I was, I could not eat any less. Good masons and carpenters, even poor ones, were rare and expensive here: to hire a pair of them for a few months would leave me too little to live on afterwards. I did not give up when I learned this, but I had no answers to the questions that plagued me.
In the beginning, my blueprint had absorbed all my time and attention because I was going to build the house from it. Gradually, the blueprint became more vivid to me than the actual house: in my imagination, I spent more and more time among the penciled lines that shifted at my will. Yet if I had openly admitted that there was no longer any possibility of building this house, the blueprint would have lost its meaning. So I continued to believe in the house, while all the time the possibility of building it eroded steadily from under my belief.
What made the situation all the more frustrating was that on the outskirts of the village new houses were springing up every few months. When I had bought the land, the only structures in the valley were stone field huts—squatting in the middle of each plowed field, they were as black as caves inside, with floors of earth. After signing the deed, I had returned home and stood, well satisfied, looking across the acres of abandoned vineyards and overgrown farmland to the horizon where the village sat piled up on a small hill, like a castle, with its church steeples clustered at the top. Now, here and there on the landscape, there was a wound of raw red earth and in a few weeks a new house would rise like a scab above it. There was no time for the landscape to absorb these changes: hardly had one house been finished before the live oaks were felled right and left for another.
I watched the progress of one house with particular horror and misgiving, because it was within a few minutes’ walk of my own. The deliberate speed with which it went up shook me and seemed a mockery of my own situation. It was an ugly house, with pink walls and cheap iron grillwork over the windows. Once it was finished, and the last young tree planted in the dust beside it, the owners drove up from the city and spent All Saints’ Day there, sitting on the terrace and looking out over the valley as though they had box seats at the opera. After that, as long as the weather held, they drove up to the house every weekend, filling the countryside with the noise of their radio. I watched them gloomily from my window.
The worst of it was that my friend immediately stopped visiting me on the weekends. I knew he had been drawn away from me by my neighbors. From a distance I saw him standing quietly among them in their yard. I felt utterly miserable. At last I had to admit how bleak my position was. It occurred to me then to sell my land and begin all over again somewhere else.
I thought I might get a good price for the land from other city people. But when I went to see the real estate agent, he told me flatly that because there was a sewage yard in the next field and because my house was uninhabitable, my property would be almost impossible to sell. He went on to say that the only people who might be interested in buying it were my neighbors, who had in fact resented my presence all this time and would give a very low sum for the land just to be rid of me. They had told the agent in confidence that my house was an eyesore in their front yard and an embarrassment when friends came to spend the day. I was shocked. My strongest feeling, of course, was that I would never sell to my neighbors. I would never give them that triumph. I turned my back on the agent and left without saying a word. As I stood deliberating on the doorstep, I heard him go into another room, say something to his wife, and laugh loudly. This was a very low point in my life.
When, after several weeks, my friend stopped coming altogether, without a word to explain his absence, my bitterness was complete. I sank into a deep depression and decided that I would give up the idea of building a house and return to my job in the city. The directors of my company had not been able to find anyone else willing to put up with the long hours and devote himself to such interminable complications. They had several times written asking me to return and offering me more money. I could easily slip back into my old way of life, I thought; this stay in the country would then have been a protracted holiday. I even managed to convince myself, for a moment, that I missed city life and my few acquaintances in the office, who used to buy me drinks after particularly tedious days. I told the agent to make an offer to my neighbors, and tried to think that I was doing the right thing. But my heart was not in the move, and I felt like a changed man as I packed up my belongings and took a last walk around my narrow boundaries.
The suitcases were out in the e
arly sunlight before the door of the house, the taxi I had hired was bumping over the dirt road toward me, and I was really on the point of leaving, when I thought I might have been too hasty. It would be wrong to go without saying anything to the young man who had been my friend, whose name I did not even know. I paid off the taxi driver and told him to come at the same hour the following day. He gave me a doubtful look and drove back down the road. The dust swirled up behind him and settled. I carried my suitcases inside and sat down. After I had spent some time wondering how to find my friend, I realized that of course I had been foolish, that I had pointlessly committed myself to one more day in these hostile surroundings, that I would not be able to find him. The directors would be annoyed when I did not arrive at the office, they would worry about me and make an attempt to reach me, and would be completely at a loss when they did not succeed. As the morning advanced I became more and more restless and angry with myself, and felt that I had made a terrible mistake. It was small comfort to know that on the following day everything would go forward as planned, and that in the end it would seem as though this day had never passed at all.