In memory of Guy Davenport (1927-2005) – who died even as I was first reading his essays and feeling kinship with his many-stranded mind:
… he had in his mind a vast library of books none of us will have the time or inclination to read. Who knows what company he kept in his imagination’s many rooms, or what corridors he walked on his way to assignations with eccentric facts and lonesome quotations. He wrote hundreds of letters like countless bees leaving the hive on urgent summer business. Maybe this is why his lungs gave out: too many pollinating bees going in too many directions, a dancing too complex for the eyes, but for the mind, his mind, that’s another thing. The etymology of each dancing buzz was enough to keep a civilisation occupied til the time comes for ruins. There is no easy compass of the present but the past has a geography and the footloose can wander and not count the days. Somehow this is how I see him, not counting the days, but footloose in a past that was always present to his mind, without punctuation or rhyme, yet crisscrossed with lucidity and unexpected correspondences. Out of these small traceries of connection, out of echoes and shadows, out of ruins ribbed with tumbledown ramparts, he used stones to build windows without walls…
