Lydia Davis Forever!

Hello!

If you had asked me two weeks ago what I read for comfort, I’m not sure what I would have said. But now I know: my comfort reading is Lydia Davis.

Let’s back up and acknowledge why I might be looking for comfort reading in this moment. Two weeks ago, I hoped that a majority of American voters would choose a qualified woman of color over a convicted felon and rapist. That hope is gone. I still have lots of other hopes, just not that one.

In case you are wondering, my politics are don’t be a bully. Occasionally, someone tells me I’m wrong to see the patriarchy or its loutish cousin, white supremacy, as a root cause of political bullying. “I don’t think they meant it like that,” I am told. If my interlocutor is ambitious, he goes on to talk about some other overarching problem: capitalism, religion, nationalism, etc. The older I get, the more I believe, to put a spin on the old Sesame Street jingle, that none of these things is unlike the other. They are all predicated on the same big lie about whose lives, bodies, and voices matter and whose don’t.

In the first days after the election, it felt like someone had turned up the gravity. My feet felt like they would sink into the earth, followed by my knees, hips, and all the parts above that don’t seem to matter to the lawmakers in my state. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t read past the headlines of most articles in the news, but I did read an op-ed by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg about the Russian notion of “internal emigration,” and this seemed to me like a healthy impulse.

In the New York Review of Books essay that Goldberg references, Viv Groskop writes:

Internal emigration is a way of retreating into yourself and shutting out the world along with everything that annoys or upsets you. The two Russian magazine editors defined internal emigration (also sometimes translated as “internal exile”) as finding a domestic space that feels like “your inner Copenhagen.” 

Now is a good time to listen to the wisdom of Russian dissidents. They know how to maintain dissent for long periods of time, under extreme duress. (Memorizing poetry is key.) I also love the idea of inner Copenhagen. When I