The following is my summary and analysis of Lydia Davis's short story "Break it Down". The story is one of the more memorable pieces in Davis's oeuvre. It is so important that Davis used "Break it Down" as the title for her collection originally published in 1986.
A third person narrator describes a man sitting at a desk trying to break it down. The narration shifts to the first-person voice of the man himself assigning a dollar amount to a love affair. The man concludes that each hour of sex costs him 33 to 50 dollars an hour.
But that barely even begins to cover it all because the man and his lover spent entire days together and every small interaction between them is worth something to the man. It is absurd to think that the man's money should only be allocated to the sex because the sex is influenced by so many other things. It's more than just sex too. It's a complex human relationship.
The man worries that he will forget the moments of his relationship. He thinks back to several meaningful scenes. In one moment he admits that without his lover he would be unable to continue living. In a nutshell, the man is obsessed with the past relationship because it gave him something that he never had before.
At this point the obsessive nature of the man's thoughts seem unhealthy. If there is an overarching idea here, then it is the destructive power of love. Perhaps that is where his urge to assign dollar values to his experiences comes from. A dollar value is as concrete and easily understandable as it gets, whereas whatever is going on his head is tough to quantify. The man also remembers many bad experiences with his lover but these moments are few and far between.
The man accepts that pain is a necessary part of the equation. Pain and pleasure are not distinct from each other. The hard part is that the pain lasts much longer than the pleasure. The man understands all of this but he admits that he would still do the same thing over again knowing how bad the pain is. At the end of the day, the only tangible effect of the relationship is an estimated loss of $1,000 and nothing to show for it. Ain't love grand.
Buy Here:
https://amzn.to/2B916W1
A third person narrator describes a man sitting at a desk trying to break it down. The narration shifts to the first-person voice of the man himself assigning a dollar amount to a love affair. The man concludes that each hour of sex costs him 33 to 50 dollars an hour.
But that barely even begins to cover it all because the man and his lover spent entire days together and every small interaction between them is worth something to the man. It is absurd to think that the man's money should only be allocated to the sex because the sex is influenced by so many other things. It's more than just sex too. It's a complex human relationship.
The man worries that he will forget the moments of his relationship. He thinks back to several meaningful scenes. In one moment he admits that without his lover he would be unable to continue living. In a nutshell, the man is obsessed with the past relationship because it gave him something that he never had before.
 |
| Lydia Davis pictured with her only friend. |
At this point the obsessive nature of the man's thoughts seem unhealthy. If there is an overarching idea here, then it is the destructive power of love. Perhaps that is where his urge to assign dollar values to his experiences comes from. A dollar value is as concrete and easily understandable as it gets, whereas whatever is going on his head is tough to quantify. The man also remembers many bad experiences with his lover but these moments are few and far between.
The man accepts that pain is a necessary part of the equation. Pain and pleasure are not distinct from each other. The hard part is that the pain lasts much longer than the pleasure. The man understands all of this but he admits that he would still do the same thing over again knowing how bad the pain is. At the end of the day, the only tangible effect of the relationship is an estimated loss of $1,000 and nothing to show for it. Ain't love grand.
Buy Here:
https://amzn.to/2B916W1
No comments:
Post a Comment