More Aphorisms by Laurence Musgrove

I wrote about Laurence Musgrove—professor of, among other things, rhetoric and composition, creative writing (poetry), and visual thinking at Angelo State University in Texas—back in 2013, in connection with his witty, illustrated alter-ego, Tex. But behind every great wisecracking cartoon character is an animated human aphorist, and Musgrove is the source of memorable maxims even when they are not appearing in speech bubbles above Tex’s head. In his recent collection—One Kind of Recording: Aphorisms—he writes, “aphorists whittle sentences to a point.” Musgrove’s sentences are pointed and often poignant observations about life’s many inconspicuous yet decisive moments. A selection…

The signposts
to your life
are just up ahead
but mostly
behind you.

The more things you know
the more things remind you
of other things you know.

The best seat in the house
is sometimes outside.

From the bandwagon
it’s hard to see
everyone
you’re running over.

Take it or leave it
usually means take it.

The only way
to get anywhere
is to leave.

Age is when
the temporary
becomes permanent.

Close friends
know how to
keep their distance.

Apology admits
it should have
spoken up sooner.

Our lives depend
on those who
depend on us.

The aphorism
is a song
we’ve never heard
but recognize.

Aphorisms by Sharon Dolin

The epigraph at the start of Sharon Dolin‘s Manual for Living is from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (Geary’s Guide, pp. 326–328) and reads:

Know first who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

Roughly the first third of Dolin’s book riffs on and is inspired by Epictetus’s Encheiridion and Discourses, in which his observations and aphorisms were recorded by his friend and follower Arrian. Dolin takes an aphorism from Epictetus and uses it as the title for a poem centered around that saying, updating the Stoic stance towards the vagaries of life with contemporary relevance. In ‘Approach Life as If It Were a Banquet’, Dolin writes with Stoic brevity of the evanescence of all things…

Implore no more / for what is, is no more.

Epictetus followed the standard Stoic line that we are not masters of our own fate and that unhappiness results when we hold mistaken beliefs about what falls within our sphere of influence. Some things are up to us, he wrote, and some are not up to us. In the great drama of human life, Epictetus said:

What is yours is to play the assigned part well. But to choose it belongs to someone else.

In ‘Always Act Well the Part That Is Given You’, Dolin writes:

Rehearse / reluctance with vehemence. The wavering scene / unwaveringly.

In ‘Happiness Can Only Be Found Within’, Dolin matches Epictetus’s

A person’s master is someone who has power over what he wants or does not want, either to obtain it or take it away. Whoever wants to be free, therefore, let him not want or avoid anything that is up to others.

with

All honor, steady bliss / comes from the peerless pear you raise / to your own lips.

And, in ‘Pay No Attention to Things That Don’t Concern You’, Dolin braids a fresh thread onto the Epictetus line

No man is free who is not master of himself.

with her own

Give up on self-belief / you’ve got to seek / in crow’s feet / of another’s smile.

I had the pleasure of spending a day last April with Sharon and other aficionados at a one-day aphorism symposium in Hartford, CT, organized by Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the ursprache blog and genius loci of Tramp Freighter. (That’s us in the below pic.) Dolin read from Manual for Living and other aphoristic work that day, demonstrating her gift for deftly slipping Stoic wisdom into poems that succeed as both lyric and aphorism.

Aphorisms by Sarah Manguso

“I don’t read prose so much as root through it for sentences in need of rescue.” This is the first sentence in Sarah Manguso’s 2016 examination of the aphorism in Harper’s, ‘In Short: Thirty-six ways of looking at the aphorism,’ in which she also confesses she has “a thing for writers who deliver their work by the line, the epigram, the aperçu.” Manguso is one of those writers herself, as she demonstrates in her collection of aphorisms, 300 Arguments (Graywolf Press, 2017).

Manguso’s Harper’s essay is an aphoristic consideration of the aphorism as a literary form. In item #27 of ‘In Short’s’ 36-section sequence, she rejects the idea that the aphorism is a modern, Twitter-induced phenomenon and, as such, is evidence that our attention spans are contracting faster than matter at the edge of a black hole. “Please don’t try to convince me that my romance with concision follows from the way we experience reality now, in interrupted and interruptive increments,” she writes, “or that if I like short literature I should be on Twitter; or that my taste is merely a symptom of a pathological inability to focus or commit; or that since I have a child I no longer have the time to write at length. I have always loved concision.”

One of the aphorisms in Manguso’s essay about aphorisms is:

Brevity isn’t the soul of witlessness; shallowness is.

The aphorism is the oldest written art form on the planet. It is now and always has been a discipline and style of philosophical thought, not some psychic shortcut to drive-thru insights. Aphorisms are words without ends. As Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (Geary’s Guide, pp. 116–118) put it,

An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought.

Manguso’s aphorisms are indeed ‘arguments’; i.e., they put forward a point of view, a position, from which readers can form their own chains of thought. The arguments in 300 Arguments are not the partisan bickering we’ve become accustomed to, but part of the writer’s process of working on, reasoning through, and figuring out that also catalyzes that same process in the reader. In so doing, Manguso’s aperçus fit Julien de Valckenaere’s (Geary’s Guide, pp. 61–62) definition of aphoristic excellence:

The shortest aphorism that makes you think the longest is the best.

A selection from 300 Arguments:

The first beautiful songs you hear tend to stay beautiful because better than beauty, which is everywhere, is the memory of first discovering beauty.

If you want to know someone’s secret, don’t ask a thing. Just listen.

Achieve a goal and suffer its loss.

The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want.

I grew up amid violently white winters and green summers and roaring autumns. Now, in a place without such seasons, I’m stuck in a waiting room with the TV on the same channel all day, and I’m never called in for my appointment.

Giving up hope and submitting to suffering looks the same as achieving total detachment and surpassing the Buddha but for one detail: the smile. Remember to smile.

Aphorisms by Evan Esar

Evan Esar, an anthologist and collector of jokes and quips, described himself as a ‘humorologist.’ “I am not interested in dull stuff like the psychology of laughter,” he is quoted as saying in his 1996 New York Times obituary. “I am interested in classifying humor, in the nature and evolution of humor. I am a man of science.” His scientific pursuit of humor led him to classify laughter as deriving from five categories: wordplay, caricature, blunders, wit and nonsense. In the introduction to 20,000 Quips & Quotes, he wrote: “Where there is insight in citation, or wisdom winged with wit, especially from the world of letters, I have quoted liberally. For a good epigram not only makes a point, but a point to ponder.” Esar’s own sayings offer plenty of points to ponder, here accompanied by related sayings from authors no doubt featured prominently in his collections…

Think twice before you speak, and then you may be able to say something more insulting than if you spoke right out at once.

Think once before you give, twice before you accept, and a thousand times before you ask. —Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Admiration: Our feeling of delight that another person resembles us.

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves. —Ambrose Bierce

Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration,and inspiration.

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. —Thomas Edison

Character is what you have left when you’ve lost everything you can lose.

Character is fate. —Heraclitus

Statistician: A man who believes figures don’t lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won’t stand up either.

Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that twice two is four. —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

An epigram is the marriage of wit, and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.

There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. —Dorothy Parker

Aphorisms by Franklin P. Jones

It’s been years since a reader first emailed me about Franklin P. Jones (1908–1980), and in that time I’ve only been able to find this collection of aphorisms from Great Thoughts Treasury and this bio from Answers.com. Jones worked as a journalist and then as a public relations executive in and around Philadelphia. His quips and sayings appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He’s part of the American tradition of homespun wisdom, and like many moral aphorists of the late 19th and early 20th century he found his metier as a columnist/newspaperman, like his predecessors Josh Billings (Geary’s Guide, pp. 13–16), Mark Twain (pp. 58–61), Ambrose Bierce (pp. 356–358) and “Kin” Hubbard (pp. 37–38), with whom he shares a similar wit and sensibility.

 

Hubbard wrote

The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.

Jones wrote

The most efficient labor-saving device is still money.

Hubbard wrote

Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.

Jones wrote

One thing you will probably remember well is any time you forgive and forget.

A selection of some of Jones’s other notable observations…

Nothing produces such odd result as trying to get even.

It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger.

What makes resisting temptation difficult, for many people, is that they don’t want to discourage it completely.

Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.

Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

A Selection of Romanian Aphorists…

The folks at Asociaţia Culturală Citatepedia have launched a project to promote Romanian culture online, and one of the first initiatives is a translation of 1,000 Romanian sayings into five languages—English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. The sayings come from across the cultural spectrum—poets, playwrights, philosophers, painters, journalists. The first queen of Romania, Carmen Sylva, who was also a writer, is represented with…

There is a goodness that repels and a badness that attracts.

Romania’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu, is featured with an observation that seems especially apt for the tumultuous times we’re currently in…

Contemporaries are the worst historians.

Which brings me to Ion Luca Caragiale, playwright, pamphleteer, poet, and political commentator, who is my favorite among these classic Romanian thinkers and writers…

Honor and grammar: these are the first conditions of a good press.

This world resembles a vast funfair.

Do you want to get to know things? Look at them closely. Do you want to like them? Look at them from afar.

The stupid die; stupidity is undying.

For the soul that is easily shaken, the threat is harder than the blow itself.

Judging by the portraits, these translations seem to focus on 18th, 19th and perhaps some early 20th century authors. For those wanting to hear a contemporary voice, check out a previous post on Valeriu Butulescu

A derailed tram considers itself independent.

You can read the full list of Romanian aphorists in English here at the Intercogito project. In the meantime, with thanks to the Asociaţia Culturală Citatepedia for providing this fascinating glimpse into Romanian aphoristic writing, a selection of some other authors and their aphorisms…

Books show us what our mind alone is not capable of making us fathom.
—Panait Istrati

Beware of banality. Don’t forget, if you must drown, at least don’t drown in a basin—fling yourself into the ocean.
—Octavian Goga

The moments of our life have the same significance as ashes being sifted
—Max Blecher

A teaspoonful of wit is sometimes worth more than a wagonful of strength.
—Liviu Rebreanu

You love your homeland even more when you have lived away from it for a while and when you have listened to what foreigners say and how they judge it.
—Iulia Hasdeu