Brian Sholis » Quotation

From Guy Davenport’s “Findings”

admin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:16:31 +0000

“What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things—earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem not ever to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoutly in its midst, aromatic stands of rabbit tobacco, beggar’s lice, lizards, the inevitable mute snake, always just leaving as you come upon him, hawks, buzzards, abandoned orchards rich in apples, peaches or plums.

“Thoreauvian, because these outings, I was to discover, were very like his daily walks, with a purpose that covered the whole enterprise but was not serious enough to make the walk a chore or a duty. Thoreau, too, was an Indian-arrowhead collector, if collector is the word. Once we had found our Indian things, we put them in a big box and rarely looked at them. Some men came from the Smithsonian and were given what they chose, and sometimes a scout troop borrowed some for a display at the county fair. Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.”

Collected in The Geography of the Imagination.

Poverty

admin — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:31:23 +0000

“It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Ruins Are Eternal

admin — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 17:46:11 +0000

“The triumphs and even the tyrannies of history endure for only a moment; it is their ruins which are eternal.” – Richard Howard, “On Lepanto: An Appreciation of Cy Twombly,” in Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003