When the writer Guy Davenport was a boy, he used to go with his family on a hunt for arrowheads on Sundays after the appalling boredom of church. It was a family outing.
I was with grown-ups, so it wasn’t play. There was no lecture, so it wasn’t school. All effort was willing, so it wasn’t work. No ideal compelled us, so it wasn’t idealism or worship or philosophy.
The hunts had no purpose, no deeper meaning.
But on those hunts, Davenport learned skills that are handy for anyone who wants to write.
• He learned how to see things, to find things.
• He also learned, when guests came along, that some people cannot see things. They can look right at something without seeing. It was, at that age, a revelation about human nature.
• He learned that some things don’t have a purpose or deeper meaning — and that those things can be valuable. When he went to college, he no purpose, no plan, no ambition. He got an education, rather than searched for a career.
Davenport’s fiction has that quality. The purpose of his stories, if there is one, is half hidden, not in plain view.
• Source: Davenport’s account is in his essay “Finding.” It's in Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
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