reading my mind through the words of others
"Clouds" is licensed by David Hepworth under CC by 2.0
Dylan Thomas said, “The blank page is where I read my mind." Additionally, as writers—and, indeed, as people—we can learn and grow a great deal by reading the minds of others. In the forthcoming months on this blog, I will be posting about a few books that have taught me a great deal.
From The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, I have learned that a story can be as short as a paragraph, yet still feel complete and connect with the reader in a deep, visceral way. Davis’s piece “The Sock” is one of the most emotionally stunning stories I have read, even though it is only two pages long. Part of what makes it so affecting is that the crux of the piece hinges on a description of a sock—something so ordinary and even a bit distasteful. Who wants to read a vivid description of a smelly, sweaty sock? Yet this is precisely what gives the sock its power as an object: it is so utterly personal, like underwear but without the sexual connotation. The main character is a divorced woman and the sock is used to characterize her ex-husband. Even more poignantly, the sock provides a glimpse into their relationship, as the woman remembers the countless times she had picked up her husband’s socks in all their years together. The juxtaposition is striking; she intimately knows how he takes off his socks while reading in bed (she describes his feet resting together “like two halves of fruit”) and yet now they are living separate lives, and he is married to a different woman.