Thursday, April 05, 2018

advice for writers

The writer no more creates writing than the electrician creates electricity. Invisible currents move at their own speed, out there, among unknown elements – and the writer merely captures a bit of that invisible world in the poor conductors available to him, and measures it and deludes others – though not himself – that he made the conductor, the current, the speeds and fluctuations. 

New, yes, to our science, but not to that invisible world itself. Nothing is new or old, there. 



No comments:

all that is old is new again: on Guy Davenport's The symbol of the archaic

  One of the great essays in my life is Guy Davenport’s The Symbol of the Archaic , which appeared in the Georgia Review in 1974. I’m not su...