Response to New Year's Resolution

I find this piece to be extremely interesting. Lydia Davis really redeems herself, in my opinion, with this piece, in that I very much follow more of what she is saying here than I cared to throughout her Mown Lawn piece.

For instance, when she says that she "thinks" she is being humble- and asks, "in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing?"- I find her question to be amazing comedic and insightful, at the same time. The truth of not being humble, no matter how humbly we try to be, is an issue which is humorous, when treated with honesty.

Is honesty, then, humble? Or is humbleness honest? Or are they not exclusive? I confuse myself with this type of dialogue, but Davis is able to weave an entire piece based upon the general gist of this whole argument. She goes on to wryly describe the difficulties of attaining that desirable state of "nothingness," in which a human is able to at last become something "positive" and good.

The truth of the matter is, the focus of attempting to become something that is nothing is so filled with a sense of doing something that it completely abolishes the idea that you are becoming nothing. And Davis states so, though admittedly, much more clearly than I have (and her dialogue was still confusing). Davis's final decision to "just try, each day, to be a little less than [she] usually [is]" (p. 103 reader) is, as stated above, highly amusing and extremely informative. The reader finally gets a sense that, in order to be nothing, one simply has to try to be less, and not think so much about it.

That said, perhaps I am not doing a good job of being nothing by writing something about all of this nothingness.