What do we think of when we pass cows grazing out along the highway, if we think anything of them at all? Perhaps we think there is something incomprehensibly dull about them—or stubbornly languid. They are fixtures of the landscape become that landscape. Their nearly inanimate bodies seem like bales of hay or rocks or trees; their consciousnesses may seem as removed. They are, as Lydia Davis reveals in The Cows, unknowable others onto which we project so much that is human. And yet, Davis asks: are we not, ourselves, unknowable others? Do we not, as the cows seem to, inhabit our own selves just as mysteriously, if perhaps somewhat less completely? READ MORE
 The Cows A prose observation of three cows by Lydia Davis Sarabande Books, 2011 37 pages Reviewed by Ann Marie Thornburg |
