Archive: June 2006

I recently disposed of an old toiletry bag. It was an unlovely thing: pallid gray, the color of chewed chewing gum. It was given away free at the last baseball game I attended before leaving San Francisco to move to Europe (that was, um, 17 years ago), so it had the SF Giants logo on one side and the Ortho corporate logo on the other. Ortho, a petroleum company, I think, was the sponsor for this particular giveaway. It was my very first toiletry bag (how did I get by without one for so long?) and, until a week or so ago, the only one I ever owned. Now I have a sleek new black toiletry bag that my wife picked up at Ikea. That’s the kind of store Ikea is: you go there for a bed or some shelves or a kitchen cabinet and come home with a set of collapsible cardboard storage boxes, a cheap and cheerful throw rug and four toiletry bags instead. Anyway, when I finally heaved the old Giants toiletry bag, I took one long last look at it and saw for the first time how shabby, battered and unappealing it really was. Why had I kept it for so long?

I’m not by nature a hoarder. In fact, I’m pretty meticulous about chucking stuff that’s been outgrown, passed its sell-by date or generally outlived its usefulness. Especially packaging. I hate having packaging lying around. This is a constant source of friction with my wife. She not only leaves empty packaging lying around, she actually puts the stuff back where she found it—even though there’s nothing left in it! I regularly find boxes of tea (without any teabags), yogurt containers (without any yogurt) and cans of beans (with about 11 mold-encrusted beans in the bottom) carefully replaced in their appropriate places in the kitchen. Why does she do it? Maybe she doesn’t realize the packaging is, in fact, empty. Or maybe, for some weird aesthetic reason, she just likes having the stuff around. Or is it some genetic memory of the Dutch “hunger winter” of 1944-45, when her parents and grandparents and everyone else in the northern half of the Netherlands survived on grass and potatoes until the Allies arrived? Anyway, having taken a more clear-eyed view of my dilapidated and, frankly, disgusting old toiletry bag, I have become less critical of this particular peccadillo.

I once had a pair of shoes that I wore for ten years. When I bought them, they were probably the single most expensive article of clothing I had ever purchased. I was determined to get value for money. But I kept on wearing them even long after they really should have been respectfully retired. When I finally did concede that I needed a new pair of shoes, I went to a shoe shop to buy them. Under the harsh glare of the shop’s fluorescent lights, with the shoe salesmen looking on disapprovingly and (I imagined at least) with a slight sense of pity, I held my old shoes in my hands and looked at them. They were incredibly shabby: all scuffed and discolored, a couple of deep gouges in the leather, and the sole peeling away from the rest of the shoe in several places. They were, I realize now, a disgrace. They looked like the shoes Charlie Chaplin wore (and ate) in The Gold Rush. But, heck, they sure were comfortable. As it says in The Upanishads:

The mind being full, the whole universe is filled with the juice of nectar; the whole earth is covered with leather to him who has put his foot in the shoe.

Amazon.com has a pretty nifty feature that’s a spin-off from its controversial Search Inside! program. Search Inside! allows users to read portions of a book, or search for keywords inside the text of a book, before actually buying it. Many publishers and authors are up in arms about it because they fear, probably correctly in the case of academic books and textbooks as well as other specialized subjects like cookbooks, that people won’t buy the books at all if they can get the information they’re looking for for free by searching inside the book on amazon. The risk to revenue is probably less for most fiction and non-fiction books, though the capability for unlimited search is certainly a threat to both authors and publishers. It’s also a useful selling tool, though, since the complete text of a book is not accessible online and if someone is sure they will find what they’re looking for in your book, they are much more likely to buy it. In any case, a side-effect of Search Inside! is that amazon compiles interesting statistics based on an analysis of the words in a book.

The stats for my history of aphorisms can be found here. Here you will learn, among other things, that of all the books in all of the categories on amazon, 63% are easier to read than my book, while 37% are harder to read. This is based on something called the Fog Index, a measure of the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of text. It is not, I hope, a measure of the mist that I deliberately pump into my prose. In terms of complexity, of words and sentence structure, my book is right in the middle, with more or less half of all other books listed as more complex and half as less complex. (A word is considered “complex” if it has three or more syllables.) I’m a bit wordy, though. Only 23% of all other amazon books have more words per sentence than mine, a statistic that comes as a mild shock to me, since I’ve always considered myself a man of few words, admittedly in speech rather than in writing, but then again I’ve always held the view that there are few greater pleasures in life than a nicely constructed long sentence with plenty of dense subordinate clauses that languidly undulate from the main sentence like so many tributaries of an interesting stream of consciousness. Or maybe not. You do get pretty good value for money from my book, though, mostly due to my verbosity. Buyers of the hardback get 4,070 words for every dollar and 3,666 words for every ounce.This is all kind of interesting but really not all that useful, except for children’s books, where measures like these would be helpful in matching a book to a child’s reading level. The really interesting statistic is the concordance, an alphabetized list of the 100 most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as “of” and “it”. As you would expect, the most frequently occurring word in my book is—you guessed it—”aphorisms”. It occurs 250 times. The next nine most frequently occurring words are:

• life 160
• own 123
• man 111
• book 105
• things 104
• time 97
• thought 93
• first 89
• world 83

The concordance is by far the most interesting, and useful, set of statistics about a book. One of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s best aphorisms is:

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

A true variation on this is:

Tell me what words you use and I’ll tell you who you are.

I was happy to see the top ten most frequently used words in my book, because three of them—life, man and thought—can be found in the Ralph Waldo Emerson aphorism that opens my book:

Life consists of what a man is thinking of all day.

This made me happy because I believe that aphorism sums up not only my book, but my life. It was gratifying to see that I was writing like I was thinking, even if I do tend to go on and on a bit…

“Do you have a light?” That’s what the guy who cleans our street asked me, a cigarette dangling from his lips, flexing his thumb as though he was giving a lighter a flick. “No, I don’t,” I said. “Sorry.” I don’t smoke, never have, and don’t carry fire about on my person. Sometimes, though, the simplest questions can get me thinking. After I answered him, I thought about the more literal, or maybe more metaphorical, meaning of his query. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson had a thing about fire. He made a trip to Vesuvius once, walked all the way up the rim, and the bubbling volcano made a deep impression on him. He bought a cheap print of Vesuvius in Italy, which still hangs in his house in Concord, Massachusetts, which is now a museum. Fire was an image of creativity and spirituality for him. In his essay The Poet, he wrote: “We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about.” So I asked myself, Do I have a light that I carry about with me?

Everybody has a light. I don’t mean some vague spiritual concept, or aura, or anything at all nebulous or New Age-y. I mean a person’s ambiance, the first impression a person makes on you, the sense of clarity or obscurity you get from speaking or interacting with a person. I mean something very tangible that you can see immediately, part of the complex set of conscious and unconscious perceptions that makes you intuitively like or dislike a person. Some people can strike us as shady, for example, as having veiled motives. Others impress instantly with their brightness, a kind of light that ignites whatever it touches. Others seem to have too much glare, as if they cast a spotlight that they both pointed at themselves and managed to stand in at the same time. Others seem to conceal their light, whether out of fear or shyness or prudence, the kind of people Jesus advised:

Don’t hide your light under a bushel.

Each member of my family has a light. My wife’s is a soft glow that seems to emanate from under her skin, kind of like the light given off when you held your hands over a flashlight as a kid—your flesh pulsed with a lovely golden red phosphorescence. My eldest son has a dazzling light, like the reflections glancing from one of those mirrored disco balls at a party. My other son is a slow burner, something molten is always smoldering behind his eyes. Watch out when he erupts. And my daughter is like a firework, one with a very short fuse that is always showering sparks; she never really goes out, just sometimes shines more, sometimes shines less.

It’s not easy to see your own light. And it can be a hindrance. It’s difficult to radiate if you’re standing in your own light, checking on your luminescence. You cast too many shadows. And whatever light you have, you always have to tend it, feed it, make sure it doesn’t go out, make sure it doesn’t get swallowed up by neighboring blazes. I used to have a preference for distant fires; they are always so hopeful. But it’s impossible to warm yourself beside them. And it’s very hard to keep them going; you have to forage far and wide for kindling. Much better to have a roaring fire close to home, I think. Pile the logs up high and let them burn. That way you can see clearly what you are doing, while the glow tends to attract like-minded folks. And there’s always an extra light to give to people in the street.

Few writers can claim to have invented an entirely new form of literature, but Ramon Gomez de la Serna was certainly one of them. Born in the Rastro district of Madrid, Ramon (as he was invariably known) devised greguerias–acute observations of everyday life tinged by his surrealistic wit and then distilled into brief, aphoristic insights. In one of his several autobiographies, he says he coined the term greguerias (which means an irritating noise, gibberish or hubbub) around 1910. He was visiting Florence in that year, gazing at the river Arno from his hotel window, when he suddenly imagined that the banks of the river wanted to swap sides. This kind of whimsical perception became characteristic of his aphorisms. He even devised a formula for their creation: metaphor + humor = greguerias. He dubbed his peculiar writing style ramonismo. One of his characteristically arresting aphorisms has to do with helping a blind person cross the street:

After helping a blind man across the road, we remain slightly undecided.

I recently helped a blind woman across the road and was struck by how accurate Gómez de la Serna’s observation is. I was walking back home from the local shops when I saw an elderly blind woman picking her way along the pavement. Construction was going on up and down the street so the woman with her white stick was constantly coming up against barriers and piles of bricks. I caught up with her and offered to lead her through the construction zone and across the street. She gratefully accepted, took my hand and we set off slowly towards the corner.

Helping a blind person has to be one of the most intimate casual encounters you can have with a complete stranger in the street. If you think about a typical day, how many times do you actually touch a stranger? Very rarely, if at all. The only experience that comes close is exchanging money in a shop. Then your hand may brush the hand of the person behind the counter, but observe how careful you both are to make sure that your fingers do not touch. Admitting a stranger into your personal space, allowing him or her to touch your skin, is not undertaken lightly.

This is why helping a blind person across the street is so intimate, and part of the reason it leaves you undecided. I held the lady’s hand and we made very slow progress up the street. Her hand was very soft and wrinkled and slightly cold. There we were, it would be some time before we reached the corner, so I thought I should start a conversation. So for the remainder of our journey we made small talk—about the neighborhood, about how there always seemed to be construction going on—and I periodically gave her updates about where we were and how far we had to go the corner. Finally, we crossed the street and I pointed the lady in the direction she wanted to go and we said goodbye. I resumed my walk home.

I didn’t get but a few meters down the street, when I stopped and turned back to look at the lady. Had I taken her far enough? Would she make the rest of her trip alright? Should I have asked if there was anything else she needed? I was undecided. Just those few moments we walked together had created a kind of intimacy, a camaraderie, and I was now unsure if I had done enough for her.

Gómez de la Serna wrote thousands and thousands of greguerías. Each of his aphorisms is both profound and comical; no event is so trivial that it does not contain some kernel of humor or wisdom or an unexpected insight:

Ants rush about as though the shops were just closing.

The giraffe is a horse elongated by curiosity.

How quickly they pack suitcases in films!

Now, reading Gómez de la Serna always leaves me slightly undecided. Am I really seeing what’s going on around me? Do I need to add a little more metaphor and humor to my life? Am I making the most of all the hubbub?

About 20 years ago, I was poking around a used bookstore in San Francisco when I spied the following title on the chipped and battered spine of a dust jacket-less hardback: Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing. With a name like that, I thought, it had to be good. So I bought it immediately; I think it cost $2.00. When I took the book home and started reading, I discovered some of the funniest, most philosophical and aphoristic poems I had ever encountered. The author was a man by the name of Samuel Hoffenstein, whom I had never heard of. In the 1920s, though, when this book was first published, he was one of the most famous American light versifiers. Six months after it appeared in 1928, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing had sold some 90,000 copies, an astonishingly high figure for a book of poetry. Hoffenstein is a master of the mundane, creating poems that make a lot out of what seems like very little.

Hoffenstein’s verse is witty, irreverent and poignant. The titles of individual poems—“Songs about Life and Brighter Things Yet; A Survey of the Entire Earthly Panorama, Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, With Appropriate Comment by the Author, of a Philosophic, Whimsical, Humorous, or Poetic Nature—a Truly Remarkable Undertaking” and “Songs of Fairly Utter Despair”—are often rewarding little poems in themselves. Hoffenstein treats life’s triumphs and tragedies with a teasing humor and a powerful sense of the transience of things. He always manages to find a big idea in the little transactions of daily life:

Babies haven’t any hair;
Old men’s heads are just as bare;—
Between the cradle and the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.

I always find Hoffenstein inspiring when inspiration seems in short supply. I was talking to a friend recently, who is working on a novel, and she said she wasn’t making any progress because she didn’t feel inspired. This launched us into a lengthy conversation in which I tried to make the point that inspiration is overrated.

There was a time when I thought that inspiration was everything when it came to writing, and I enthusiastically pursued various routes to induce that state when it was reluctant to come about of its own accord. But it seems to me now that inspiration, while it has its uses, is probably the least important thing about writing. Much more vital, in my view, is simply doing it—especially when you’re feeling least inspired. Writing is a job, just like being an accountant, a bricklayer or a school teacher. If your accountant said to you, ‘I’m not doing your taxes before the deadline because I don’t feel inspired,’ you’d look for another accountant pretty quick. I feel the same way about writing. I hardly ever feel inspired. If I waited for that elusive feeling to descend upon me, I’d never get anything done. So after I roll out of bed in the morning, I roll into my study, sit down before a blank screen and start writing—whether I feel inspired or not. And to my delight and amazement, something worthwhile usually gets written.

Thomas Edison coined one of the best ever aphorisms about inspiration:

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

I think what Edison said about genius applies to creativity, too. Inspiration is a lovely feeling. Those eureka moments—when the solution to a problem suddenly comes to you out of the blue, when the perfect words in the perfect order just seem to flow effortlessly out of you—are precious. But they are by definition fleeting, and it’s difficult to build much of substance on such evanescent foundations. So I look to that great sage Nike for my philosophy about writing: Just do it. My experience has been that writing is the mother of inspiration, not the other way around. It’s sort of like learning to play a musical instrument. After the drudgery of practicing day in and day out for a very long time, one day you find you’re making really sweet music. Inspiration has very little to do with it. And the most inspiring thing of all about this is, something interesting always turns up as long as you’re always willing to keep digging. What that even greater sage Marcus Aurelius said about goodness also applies to creativity:

Delve within; within is the fountain of good, and it is always ready to bubble up, if you always delve.

About 20 years ago, I was poking around a used bookstore in San Francisco when I spied the following title on the chipped and battered spine of a dust jacket-less hardback: Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing. With a name like that, I thought, it had to be good. So I bought it immediately; I think it cost $2.00. When I took the book home and started reading, I discovered some of the funniest, most philosophical and aphoristic poems I had ever encountered. The author was a man by the name of Samuel Hoffenstein, whom I had never heard of. In the 1920s, though, when this book was first published, he was one of the most famous American light versifiers. Six months after it appeared in 1928,Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing had sold some 90,000 copies, an astonishingly high figure for a book of poetry. Hoffenstein is a master of the mundane, creating poems that make a lot out of what seems like very little.

Hoffenstein’s verse is witty, irreverent and poignant. The titles of individual poems—“Songs about Life and Brighter Things Yet; A Survey of the Entire Earthly Panorama, Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, With Appropriate Comment by the Author, of a Philosophic, Whimsical, Humorous, or Poetic Nature—a Truly Remarkable Undertaking” and “Songs of Fairly Utter Despair”—are often rewarding little poems in themselves. Hoffenstein treats life’s triumphs and tragedies with a teasing humor and a powerful sense of the transience of things. He always manages to find a big idea in the little transactions of daily life:

Babies haven’t any hair;
Old men’s heads are just as bare;—
Between the cradle and the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.

I always find Hoffenstein inspiring when inspiration seems in short supply. I was talking to a friend recently, who is working on a novel, and she said she wasn’t making any progress because she didn’t feel inspired. This launched us into a lengthy conversation in which I tried to make the point that inspiration is overrated.

There was a time when I thought that inspiration was everything when it came to writing, and I enthusiastically pursued various routes to induce that state when it was reluctant to come about of its own accord. But it seems to me now that inspiration, while it has its uses, is probably the least important thing about writing. Much more vital, in my view, is simply doing it — especially when you’re feeling least inspired. Writing is a job, just like being an accountant, a bricklayer or a school teacher. If your accountant said to you, ‘I’m not doing your taxes before the deadline because I don’t feel inspired,’ you’d look for another accountant pretty quick. I feel the same way about writing. I hardly ever feel inspired. If I waited for that elusive feeling to descend upon me, I’d never get anything done. So after I roll out of bed in the morning, I roll into my study, sit down before a blank screen and start writing—whether I feel inspired or not. And to my delight and amazement, something worthwhile usually gets written.

Thomas Edison coined one of the best ever aphorisms about inspiration:

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

I think what Edison said about genius applies to creativity, too. Inspiration is a lovely feeling. Those eureka moments—when the solution to a problem suddenly comes to you out of the blue, when the perfect words in the perfect order just seem to flow effortlessly out of you—are precious. But they are by definition fleeting, and it’s difficult to build much of substance on such evanescent foundations. So I look to that great sage Nike for my philosophy about writing: Just do it. My experience has been that writing is the mother of inspiration, not the other way around. It’s sort of like learning to play a musical instrument. After the drudgery of practicing day in and day out for a very long time, one day you find you’re making really sweet music. Inspiration has very little to do with it. And the most inspiring thing of all about this is, something interesting always turns up as long as you’re always willing to keep digging. What that even greater sage Marcus Aurelius said about goodness also applies to creativity:

Delve within; within is the fountain of good, and it is always ready to bubble up, if you always delve.

It was in a copy of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. My parents gave me this book in 1981 as a high school graduation present. There is an inscription from them to me in it. My sister must have recommended that my parents buy the book; otherwise, I don’t imagine they would have known at the time that I was interested in such things. The book also contained a letter written to me by my sister in 1981, also on the occasion of my graduation from high school. I took the book down from my shelf for the first time in 25 years because I want to include Gibran in the encyclopedia of aphorists I’m working on. (Insert shameless self-promotion here: It’s due out from Bloomsbury USA in November of 2007, so consider your Christmas shopping for next year done!) In her letter, my sister complains that she can’t concentrate because her kids are climbing all over her but she wants “to write something you’ll never forget.” Reading her letter, I was astonished at how drastically some things have changed and how, equally dramatically, some things have remained exactly the same.

One of my favorite Arthur Schopenhauer aphorisms is:

If you want to know how you really feel about someone take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you first see it on the doormat.

I was delighted to see my sister’s letter, again. The tables have turned on us. Twenty-five years ago, she had three young children to contend with; now, I do. Back then, I was just embarking on my college education; my sister, after raising her family, has recently finished hers, and is now starting a career as a therapist and academic. In a strange but pleasant exchange of fates, we have switched roles. Today, I’m a bit like my sister was 25 years ago: a work-at-home parent, struggling to write something unforgettable amidst the din of a boisterous family life. And my sister is a bit like me as an 18-year-old: a recent graduate excitedly setting out on new learning and work experiences. We both, happily, still have our whole lives ahead of us.

I remember reading The Prophet during “senior week” in 1981. That’s the week after graduation in June when every high school grad in eastern Pennsylvania travels to the New Jersey shore for seven straight days of debauchery. I enjoyed my debauch, but in between I was reading Gibran, grateful that my sister had suggested that my parents get the book for me. I was deeply into the history of religion and spirituality at the time, with a particular interest in Gnosticism, a religious/philosophical movement that peaked in the Middle East around the first and second centuries. The Prophet is very much in the Gnostic tradition: Passengers on a ship implore a wise man travelling on board to share his wisdom, and the book consists of his aphorisms on life, love and death strung together into miniature essays.

When I told my sister I had found the letter, she quoted from memory one of the aphorisms that had meant the most to her. It was:

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

Just the day before she told me this, this was one of the aphorisms I had selected for inclusion in my encyclopedia.

In her letter, my sister wrote that she hoped I would carry my ideals into my future life and she wished that all my experiences would be growing ones. I had a lot of ideals as an 18-year-old. After graduating, I remember vowing to my parents that I would never wear a tie again. I had to wear a tie throughout primary school and high school as part of the school uniform. To protest what I felt at the time was a constricting concession to conformity and fashion, I deliberately wore the most outrageous ties I could find—bold pastels, brazen plaids, anything with golf clubs or ducks on it—and then I scribbled aphorisms (yes, aphorisms) on them. Some of my other ideals were more sophisticated, like the promise I made to myself never to sacrifice my inner, creative life in order to make a living.

I have not always lived up to my ideals over the past 25 years. I don’t mind wearing ties now, though my taste in them is still appalling. And my inner life has often been in conflict with the need to make a living. Reading my sister’s letter, though, I was happy to recognize the person she was writing to. It’s me, as I was then and still am, struggling to keep my ideals real. And I was happy to read again her words of encouragement, since I realized too that I need them just as much now as I did then.