Some young people have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary farm. I was older than I should have been when I finally acknowledged the dream was not going to become a reality.
It’s hard to explain how something that lives only in imagination can sustain you. But Lydia Davis gets at it in her short story “The House Plans.”
In the beginning, my blueprint had absorbed all my time and attention because I was going to build my 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 openly admitted 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.
The farm had a foothold in my imagination by the time I was 12. It persisted in my imagination for years, even when I discovered other things that I’d hope to discover while farming.
It’s the only explanation I have for the collection of books on agriculture on my bookcase. Somehow, I can’t get rid of them.
• Source: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; New York: Picador, 2009. “The House Plans” is on pp. 51-61. The quotation is on p. 55.
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