Some gems by the late Guy Davenport, one of the best critics and essayists of the 20th C. (and talented short story writer and artist to boot) - or Credo at 5.001:
“The business of a writer is to show others how you see the world so that they will then have two views of it, theirs and yours. We are all of us trapped in our minds. We can get out through the imaginative alchemy of reading, a skill complementary to writing but psychologically more mysterious. How writing is written is a process far more straightforward than how it is read.” - From “Keeping Time” in The Hunter Graccus
“The young Orville and Wilbur had constructed mechanical bats, Otto said, after the designs of Sir George Cayley and Penaud. For America was the land where the learning of Europe was so much speculation to be tested on an anvil. They read Octave Chanute’s Flying Machines; they built kites. The kite was the beginning, not the bird. That was da Vinci’s radical error. The kite had come from China centuries ago. It had passed through the hands of Benjamin Franklin, who caught electricity for the magician Edison, who, it was said, was soon to visit Prague. Men such as Otto Lilienthal had mounted kites and rode the wind and died like Icarus. The Wrights knew all these things. They read Samuel Pierpont Langley; they studied the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. That was the way of Americans. They took theories as pelicans swallowed fish, pragmatically, and boldly made realities out of ideas.” From “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” in Tatlin!
“The hope of philosophy was to create a tranquility so stable that the world could not assail it. This stability will always turn out to be a madness or obsession or brutal indifference to the world. Philosophy is rather the self-mastery that frees one enough – of laziness, selfishness, rage, jealousy, and such failures of spirit – to help others, write for others, draw for others, be friends.” From journal excerpts included in The Hunter Graccus
“It is true that the arts keep us sane, but a larger bias for this perception is surely the fact that the arts keep us civilized. Once a poem is written, it belongs to the world, and its greatest destiny is its usefulness to the tribe. Language ís perpetually refined by the poet, the eye is taught by the painter, the ear by the composer.” From “Where Poems Come From” in The Geography of the Imagination
The first three quotes are culled from the excellent blog Anecdotal Evidence, run by Partick Kurp - the last is a personal favourite of mine, as it describes very precisely the purpose of a Log such as Ordinary Finds, which endeavours in a small way to keep the lives and works of poets, painters and composers and other workers in the arts present to our minds.
