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(this post was reblogged from ascendingcoherence)
Socrates’ daimon was an inheritance from the Pythagoreans. All of our daimons are personifications of the past, which is the ground beneath our feet. The more diligent the writer, the deeper into the past he can reach. The old Tolstoy became a contemporary of the prophet Amos. Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake speaks from the bogs, through the mists. Centuries intervened between the war in Troy and the daimon of Homer.
Guy Davenport, born today, in the essay “Keeping Time,” as reprinted in The Hunter Gracchus. (via ascendingcoherence)
