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Author: James Geary

What is Churchillian Drift?

James Geary
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Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

I was reminded of “Churchillian Drift” while reading the comments on Aphorisms by Ben Franklin. Churchillian Drift is a precursor to Anatole’s Axiom (scroll down the Corrections & Clarifications page for a short discourse on the subject) devised by British gnomologist Nigel Rees, and explained by him in his piece ‘Policing Word Abuse’: “Long ago, I coined the term ‘Churchillian Drift’ to describe the process whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one side and replaced by someone more famous. So to Churchill or Napoleon would be ascribed what, actually, a lesser-known political figure had said. The process occurs in all fields.” Churchillian Drift bobs up among some of the biggest names in the aphorism business, not just Churchill and Napoleon but Einstein

Not everything that counts can be counted

Gandhi

Be the change you wish to see in the world

and Lincoln

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The thing is, though, you do not find yourself the target of Churchillian Drift unless, like Churchill himself, you are already a damn fine aphorist. Part of the reason it’s so easy to mis-attribute brilliant sayings to great aphorists is that they have already coined so many brilliant sayings themselves. Which is also why, I guess, they might feel occasionally justified in purloining an orphan phrase to make it their own. After all, Franklin may or may not have originated the aphorism

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

but he never said anything against being a plagiarist…

Aphorisms by Anna Kamienska

James Geary
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Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the always enlightening ursprache blog as well as the aphoristically amazing Tramp Freighter, sends news of the “aphoristic entries (or ‘entreaties’?)” of Anna Kamienska (1920-1986), from the June 2010 issue of Poetry, translated and introduced by Clare Cavanagh. “Many of [Kamienska’s] aphorisms are infused with grief at the loss of her husband to cancer at an early age,” Jim writes. “And evidently his death prompted her to come to terms with God and renewed her interest in prayer and religious ritual. Some of her aphorisms relate to the struggles involved in writing poetry in the modern world. And a good number are about the shared experience we call life.” From In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska, Selected and translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh:

The sunrise observed in a puddle—a great metaphor.

Better if only the young and beautiful would love. But love in those aging aspics, those monstrous, flopping bodies, desire housed in the bodies of cripples, the legless, the blind—that is humanity.

We don’t realize that we live atop a quagmire of cults. Every gesture, understood rightly, has its roots in some sacred archetype. How much of me is that primeval man yearning for heaven, waiting for some sudden opening of the skies and another, true time, in which everything remains and nothing passes?

Art relies on the conversion of even flaws and defects into positive aesthetic values. It is a strange hymn to stupidity.

The curse of man: everything he makes outlives him.

Music teaches us the passing of time. It teaches the value of a moment by giving that moment value. And it passes. It’s not afraid to go.

Father J. tells me about his theory. Every time he has an inner question, it is always answered unexpectedly by someone entering the room, by an overheard conversation.

Collecting pebbles for a new mosaic of a world that I could love.

We create eternity from scraps of time.

We always receive more than we desire. We receive what we ask for, but sometimes in a different currency, a currency that turns out to be of greater worth.

Aphorisms by Ben Franklin

James Geary
14 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

“Ben Franklin Is a Big Fat Idiot” is an entertaining re-appreciation of America’s founding aphorist by Joe Queenan. Queenan rightly points out that Big Fat Ben often purloined his sayings from sages past, and not all of the Great Man’s maxims are equally great. I don’t think this should in any way diminish Franklin’s reputation as one of the aphoristic titans, however. If you read any of the master aphorists, it is always a minority of their sayings that are truly phenomenal. Phenomenal aphorisms are very hard to write, so it shouldn’t surprise us that the truly great sayings are but a subset of the entire aphoristic oeuvre. And in regard to charges of plagiarism, we must remember Anatole’s Axiom, first laid down by French novelist Anatole France:

When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

Franklin did just that, but in copying what had already been said well he added distinctive flourishes and twists that make the recycled sayings truly his own. My favorite Franklinism, and one of my all-time favorite aphorisms, remains:

It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.

xkcd on The Difference between Similes and Metaphors

James Geary
4 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

xkcd is a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” and has one of the funniest, and most accurate, takes on the difference between similes and metaphors I’ve ever read. It’s also not too shabby on puns, either. xkcd is “a CNU graduate with a degree in physics. Before starting xkcd, I worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. As of June 2007 I live in Massachusetts. In my spare time I climb things, open strange doors, and go to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so I can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable. At frat parties I do the same thing, but the other way around.” xkcd’s favorite astronomical entity is the Pleiades. Click on the comic to make it larger.

Aphorisms by George Santayana

James Geary
9 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the always enlightening ursprache blog as well as the aphoristically amazing Tramp Freighter, sends news of a new book on philosopher-aphorist George Santayana: The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. This article from City Pulse describes the book, a collection of scholarly essays, and includes the Santayana sayings listed below. Santayana (pp. 346–347 in Geary’s Guide) led a life completely dedicated to literature, thanks in part to a hefty inheritance from his mother. He studied and taught at Harvard, where William James was a fellow student and T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens were his pupils. An atheist, he spent the last decade of his life in a convent in Rome, cared for by the nuns. I recently came across Atoms of Thought, an aphoristic compilation of excerpts from Santayana’s books, published in 1950. It’s a kind of anthology, with the excerpts arranged under key categories and themes. Santayana is distinctive for having coined several phrases that have become proverbial, like

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

But my favorite Santayana-ism is:

The God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

Here are the aphorisms quoted in the City Pulse piece:

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

The Bible is a wonderful source of wisdom for those who don’t understand it.

Aphorisms by Franz Kafka

James Geary
6 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the ursprache blog, read The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Schocken Books, 2006), translated by Michael Hofmann, on a plane recently and sent these thoughts: “The original aphorisms, though known of and posthumously published but only partly, were discovered in a folder in an archive in the new Bodleian Library at Oxford University. It was evident from the care in which they were composed (carefully hand written, numerated and ordered on thin strips of paper) that they were meant to be read as a whole series. In the introduction and the concluding essay to the volume, the Kafka scholar Roberto Calasso gives context to these aphorisms and the period of their undertaking. They were composed by Kafka in 1917-18 during a convalescence and a time of relative ease (except for the torment of household mice), while he was living with his sister in the town Zürau.  As the introduction states, the aphorisms, though few in number (just over a hundred), are a varied lot. Some are short and pithy, as we expect of the aphorism. But quite few run to paragraph length. And some, but not the best of them, delve into theological issues based on Biblical themes. Others are sophisticated philosophical musings. A few are lovely collapsed parables, like this one:

The dogs are still playing in the yard, but the quarry will not escape them, never mind how fast it is running through the forest already.

Strangely, almost none of these aphorisms speak directly about fiction, literature or the practice of writing. This one comes closest:

‘And then he went back to his job, as though nothing had happened.’ A sentence that strikes one as familiar from any number of stories—though it might not have appeared in any of them.

And since that one comes very close to the end of the collection, it might serve as an apt summation for these fleeting illuminations written while Kafka himself was relieved for a time from the obligations and stresses of work; and fitting, too, because the aphorism, as genre, was a type of literary work he never returned to.”

Kafka is featured on pp. 372–374 of Geary’s Guide, but here are some Zürau aphorisms not in my book:

You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world—that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature—but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.

Theoretically, there is one consummate possibility of felicity: to believe in the indestructible in oneself, and then not to go looking for it.

He runs after the facts like someone learning to skate, who furthermore practices where it is dangerous and has been forbidden.

In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world’s coat.

Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.

There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.

Aphorisms by Thomas Fitzgerald

James Geary
5 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

Thomas Fitzgerald has cooked up an original mix of aphorisms (what he calls “the stuff of life”) and bread recipes (what has long been known as the staff of life). Daily Bread consists of 705 original aphorisms and a clutch of recipes from some of America’s foremost bread makers. “We might look upon aphorisms and epigrams … much as we look upon bread,” Fitzgerald writes, “as an essential substance that nourishes us on a most fundamental level, while leaving us with a warm and enduring sense of satisfaction. Indeed, what aphorism or epigram is not a sort of manna wrought from the grist of life itself, smeared over with a most-pleasing confection?” Which only serves to prove what I’ve always argued: Aphorisms are all you really knead.

Every liar must possess in memory what he lacks in conscience.

Anger acknowledged is information; anger acted upon, error.

Humility is the last lesson learned, the first forgot.

A single rose is an expression of love; a dozen, an admission of guilt.

Maturity is wasted on the mature.

He who laughs last laughs alone.

More Aphorisms by Eric Nelson

James Geary
6 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

Eric Nelson, whom you may recall from this 2009 post, is back with some more of his haiku-like aphorisms. Some of these sayings have unmistakeable Zen overtones, such as the aphorism below about the green mountain. Yet others, like the one about chickens and hawks, are much more in the proverbial tradition. An interesting combination, since Zen-like aphorisms tend towards the paradoxical while proverbs are much more matter-of-fact, a mix that gives these poems/haikus/koans/aphorisms a tinge of Eastern mysticism along with a dollop of Mid-Western (or maybe Southern?) plainspeaking.

In the gray brain nothing
Is black or white.

The dead know nothing,
The only thing
You can’t imagine.

A thousand shades of green
Make the mountain
A singular green.

Whether you see them or not
Stars are always there,
Always falling.

If you’ll have chickens
Expect hawks.

Aphorisms by Charles Simic

James Geary
7 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

This just in from Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the ursprache blog: “Charles Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Serbia (Yugoslavia at the time). His family came to the U.S. in 1954 and settled in Chicago. He has published numerous books of poetry and critical prose, and has won major awards for his poetry, a Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among others. He has keen eye for the unusual poetic image and the expressiveness of everyday circumstances. Inflected by philosophical notions and the darker aspects 20th-century history, his poetry has an easy way of blending the profound and comic. In 2008 he published a collection of his aphorisms, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth (Ausable Press, 2008).” A selection of aphorisms from The Monster Loves His Labyrinth:

The new American Dream is to get very rich and still be regarded as a victim.

The infinite riches of an empty room. Silence makes visible what now appears to be the most interesting grain of dust in the whole world.

Being is not an idea in philosophy, but a wordless experience we have from time to time.

Consciousness: this dying match that sees and knows the name of what it throws its brief light upon.

We live in the nameless present convinced if we give things names we will know where we are.

Everything, of course, is a mirror if you look at it long enough.

Check out ursprache for more of Jim Finnegan’s musings…

Metaphors, Aphorisms, and Volcanoes

James Geary
12 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

There is a metaphor and an aphorism for everything, including volcanic eruptions.

In thinking about the eruption of Iceland’s volcano, I was reminded of The Prose Edda, the 13th century Icelandic epic by Snorri Sturluson. The Prose Edda is a handbook for aspiring poets and, according to Snorri, by far the most important thing for poets to know is how to make a proper kenning.

A kenning is a metaphor that replaces a proper name with a poetic description of what that person, place or thing is or does. For example, in ancient Icelandic verse, a sword is not a sword but an “icicle of blood”; a ship is not a ship but the “horse of the sea”; eyes are not eyes but the “moons of the forehead”.

Though invented by ancient Icelandic bards, kennings are still quite common. We use them every day. Simple phrases such as ‘brain storm’ and ‘pay wall’ are basic kennings, as is ‘pain in the ass’ as in you are not you but ‘a pain in the ass’.

Kennings are often among the first metaphors children produce. I remember standing at a window with my eldest son, Gilles, when he was about two. We were looking at a rainbow. He pointed to the sun streaming from behind some dark clouds and blurted out “big sky lamp”, a classic kenning if there ever was one.

So in honor of the Icelandic volcano, it seemed only natural to come up with some appropriate kennings.

Pliny the Younger, writing about the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, described the volcano’s plume as “a pine tree. It rose into the sky on a very long ‘trunk’ from which spread some ‘branches’.” So in kenning form, this eruption could be described as ‘a giant tree of smoke and ash’.

The thing about kennings, though, is that they inevitably reveal our true feelings. If you want to know what you really think of someone or something—your significant other, maybe, or your job—try coming up with some relevant kennings. You might be surprised.

The most appropriate kennings for this eruption, which is overwhelmingly seen in the context of personal inconvenience and financial damage, are good examples of this. So better perhaps than ‘giant tree of smoke and ash’ are kennings like ‘nightmare of air travelers’, ‘disrupter of business meetings and state funerals’, ‘bankrupter of airlines’ maybe, and ‘windfall for train, bus and ferry operators’ certainly.

For me personally, living as I do under one of the flight paths for Heathrow, the best kenning is: ‘silencer of the skies’.

Which is another interesting thing about kennings: They often highlight some seemingly insignificant aspect of an event that later turns out to be decisive. Who could have predicted that, for me at least, the biggest impact of the eruption of an Icelandic volcano would be a few days of peace and quiet?

The eruption of another Icelandic volcano in 1783 is believed to have been one of the causes of the French Revolution, because the ash cloud led to a poor harvest in France and that, in turn, led to even more public unrest. Who can say what the ultimate consequences of this eruption will be?

In all the commentary around the eruption, the most insightful comment I’ve heard came from an Icelandic meteorologist. I doubt he intended this statement as an aphorism, but it certainly is. “Something is happening,” he said, “but we don’t know what it is.”

(Presented at the TED Salon, London, 21 April, 2010)