“Certainly [Guy Davenport] can’t be convicted of not having a theory, though it is not a theory of reading but a theory of history. It is very likely untrue, but it got his book written. It says, I was happier at ten than I am at fifty-four, and a like pattern is discernible in America. As the fields where we sought those arrowheads are now under an immense lake, so oblivion has engulfed American consciousness, and arts vainly array particulars hardly anyone can command the knack to read. Hence these pages, in which I take pleasure in my own bright arrays, culled in homage from Poe and Pound and Grant Wood and Whitman and Joyce and Zukofsky and Eudora Welty and as many other sly but masterful spirits as I’ve had occasion to pay attention to.”

(Hugh Kenner, “A Geographer of the Imagination: the astute eye of Guy Davenport,” Harper’s, August 1981, p. 68.)

“It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.”

(Buckminster Fuller, quoted on p. 90 of Guy Davenport’s “Wo es war, soll ich werden” in The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers.)

“Actually, this is a device used brilliantly by George Borrow, whose books simply stop. I like this sense of ‘okay, that’s it’ that eloquently supersedes the expectation of surprise and closure. It’s a new kind of surprise. Little Niels Bohr is said to have shown his father a homework assignment to look over. The homework was about the periodic table, and Father noted that Niels had left out hydrogen. This was easily fixed: ‘In conclusion, I would like to mention hydrogen.’ This is worthy of Calvin, but suggests with uncorrupted honesty that grand finales are a suspect posture.”

(Guy Davenport interviewed by John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Paris Review 163.)

INTERVIEWER

How does your interest in flying technology fit into your view of technology in general, which is fairly suspicious? You’ve written several times, and eloquently, about cars, for instance, about how they’ve changed our views of space, of the city, of our own bodies.

DAVENPORT

The point of view I take is the point of view of Diogenes, which is that when a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man. The thing about technology is that it owns us. I know several desperately poor people, practically beggars, who own cars. On the other hand, you have people who drive their cars to work, to make a living, or to have a delightful excursion in it with the wife and children. But the point is that all progress asks that we pay a kind of ransom or blackmail in order to have it. The telephone is God’s gift to the bore.

(Guy Davenport interviewed by John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Paris Review 163; noted by Wyatt Mason. See also: Patrick Kurp.)

“Fourier thought that our dream of a golden age that never was is a vision of his Période Amphiharmonique. In our time we long not for a lost past but for a lost future.”

“For every lack of civilization we pay dearly with boredom, outrage, death.”

“Butler’s insight was that the machine enslaved us, changing all work to drudgery. All work became pandering to the reproduction of the machines.”

(Guy Davenport, Apples and Pears, p. 64, p. 77, p. 163.)