Guy Davenport writes some of the most dazzling prose I’ve ever known, and I loved that gorgeous passage on the thorn hedge from The Hunter Gracchus (Davenport, not Kafka) that was transcribed on the Laudator Temporis Acti blog some weeks ago. So I’m even more delighted to find today Anecdotal Evidence tracing the Columella source (De Re Rustica and De Arboribus — available as Loebs) through Davenport to Thoreau.Also very pleased to learn that “columella also refers to the fleshy external end of the nasal septum and, in a pleasing convergence, the structural shaft around which a snail shell is arranged (see Davenport�s �snails use them for a world�). Several genera and species of gastropods are also named columella.”
I need to find time for reading Davenport again: I ordered THG, it wings its way to me. (It is very hard to be in preparation for a profession where you need to up and doing all the time, if you are fundamentally a rather private and inwardy sort of person who wants to be quietly curled up in bed reading.)
Query: Where does Dr Michael Gilleland have so much time to read and come across all these wonderful things? I am out of my mind with envy. (Also, he got his PhD in Classics from UVA. How can anyone resist a UVA Classicist? Perhaps one day I shall brave a tiny cyber-hello on the strength of our alma mater, but I don’t quite dare.)
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird