Author: James Geary

A fascinating congruence of aphorisms described in this New York Times piece about the aphorism by Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, “Never let a crisis go to waste” appearing on the signboard outside the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. I blogged about this aphorism in November (Aphorisms in Emergencies) and now, to see it featured in a church signboard, recalls an even earlier series of blogs about this very public display of affection for the aphoristic form (More of God’s Aphorisms, Make Your Own God’s Aphorisms). The original post in this series, God’s Aphorisms, seems to have gone missing in last year’s catastrophic crash of this site, so I’m still waiting for God’s Aphorisms to rise again… Anyway, I thought the appearance of Emanuel’s aphorism in this context is a neat demonstration of the way aphorisms cross church-state boundaries, and how sayings evolve, change, and gain unrelated accretions as they become introduced more widely. Interestingly, the name Immanuel means, “God with us.”

This just in: God’s Aphorisms have risen again, here. Sadly, all the comments are well and truly gone…

Marty Rubin explains the point of his aphorisms (as well as the point of aphorisms in general) very well, so I hereby quote him at length: “Since childhood I’ve been intrigued by the question: What is happiness? And also: What is death? The answer to these two questions sent me down the road of philosophy. That road I’ve found, at least for me, is not a serious but a whimsical one, full of ironies, jokes, contradictions, fragmentary thoughts, clever, perverse, mystifying, exasperating, irreverent and playful reflections. Writing aphorisms I am able to participate in this delightful game, pursuing freedom and wisdom down all the blind alleys of language and thought toward that inevitable dead end.” If we are indeed headed inevitably down a dead end at the dizzying speed of thought, then we might as well enjoy the ride. So here are some of Marty Rubin’s clever, perverse, mystifying, exasperating, irreverent and playful reflections:

Language—a mirror in front of a window.

Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they’ll be pleasantly surprised.

If there’s war in heaven and peace in hell, then hell’s the place to be.

If you need a second to think, it’s too late.

Loud applause is enough to make any speaker doubt himself.

Rain is the picnic when it rains.

Aphorists are everywhere, at work in every language, in every culture. But they often labor on the fringes, since aphorisms are still largely an unheralded literary genre—despite the fact that everybody uses aphorisms every day. It’s especially difficult to get hold of aphorisms written in other languages. Yes, La Rochefoucauld has been translated into zillions of foreign tongues. But what about contemporary practitioners who can’t find foreign publishers for their latest aphoristic blockbuster? It’s always a pleasure to present aphorists working in languages other than English. So without further ado, here are two contemporary Russian aphorists for your delectation. All aphorisms translated from the Russian by Aron Vigushin.

By Gregory Gash

Work—the only bad habit people want to get rid of.

Stupidity is like an umbrella; touch it and it opens.

By Aron Vigushin

Truth—a provisional agreement between opposing sides.

Resume—a lie that lands you a real job.

Advertising—bragging for which the buyer pays.

History—a science that describes past events from the present point of view.

J.L. Burckhardt was a Swiss traveller and Arabic scholar with a passion for proverbs. He travelled extensively in the Middle East in the early part of the 19th century, a time when doing so meant disguising himself as a Muslim merchant so that he wouldn’t be spotted as European. He visited the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the guise of a pilgrim. When travelling, he was known as “Shaikh Ibrahim”. He began collecting proverbs during his journeys; he was particularly fond of common expressions used in everyday language and used to jot these down whenever he heard them. He added his own acquisitions to a collection made nearly a century earlier by Sharaf ad-Din ibn Asad to produce Arabic Proverbs, or The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Omitted from this wise, insightful compendium were those sayings that, Burckhardt confessed, were “so grossly indelicate that he could not venture to lay them before the public, although it must be acknowledged that they excelled in wit.” Below are a few of the sayings Burckhardt felt could safely be laid before the public…

My thanks to Nadeem El Issa of Joppa Books for alerting me to Burckhardt, sending me a copy of Arabic Proverbs, and translating many of the same.

The hasty and the tardy must meet at the ferry.

Cat’s dreams are full of mice.

There are no fans in hell.

Whatever is in the cauldron must come out with the ladle.

These sayings are from A Thousand and One Arabic Proverbs, by Dalal Khalil Safadi:

Stretch your feet to the edge of your rug.

He who is ahead of you one step will be ahead of you all the way.

Today’s news costs money; tomorrow it will be free.

A knife’s wound will heal; a tongue’s wound won’t.

And these sayings are among Nadeem El Issa’s favorites:

The eye will never rise above the eyebrow.

If you beat someone, make them hurt; if you feed someone, make them full.

Farts don’t fry eggs.

Thomas Farber sums it up well, the paradox of writing aphorisms, a process that involves attempting to write something very very big in a format that is very very small: “Such an odd form: to strive for compression, verbal surprise, paradox, shock, rueful acknowledgment, or revelation of moral blindness may bring out one’s own oddities … Focusing, laser-like, on a single line—erotics of the irreducible; or working on a tiny canvas, like the 1970s artist who painted imaginary postage stamps.” Farber crams a lot into his own sayings, which he refers to as epigrams more often than as aphorisms. Many are miniature novellas—a glimpse of some hinted-at encounter, a one-sided dialogue with characters only known as ‘he’ or ‘she’. Farber is a senior lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment,Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor fellowships. His sayings can be found in the books Truth Be Told and The Twoness of Oneness.

Old age. Farewells-in-progress, some not articulated. Oneself in the mirror: person to whom you must be sure to say goodbye.

“Who gives a shit?” the asshole asked, neglecting to wipe his mouth.

“I might…” Maysayer.

Writer: someone who can’t go without saying.

Material times: the going rate of self-interest.

Raised voices (should) raise skepticism.

“Aphorisms are like caffeinated drinks,” says Olivia Dresher. And hers definitely give you a refreshing buzz. Dresher describes her aphorisms as “often personal (“I” statements) and poetic; some are written in the form of questions. They’re colored by intuition as well as thought. I hope some of my aphorisms bring a female sensibility to the mostly-male form.” She cites Antonio Porchia (see the Guide, pp. 379–381) as one of her favorites, and his gentle, Zen-like insights are also present in Dresher’s aphorisms, too. Dresher is is a writer, publisher, anthologist, former musician, and an advocate for historic preservation. She is also a devotee of the fragment, and is founder, director, or editor (and sometimes all three) of Impassio Press (an independent literary press publishing fragmentary writing), the Life Writing Connection (an online, annotated directory of unpublished American life writings from the 20th century), and FragLit Magazine. You can read more about Olivia Dresher here, and read additional aphorisms here. Here is a small selection (Warning: contains caffeine!):

Ordinary life is like a bad novel: clichés everywhere, and no real character development.

A vacation is a cage of freedom.

Life used to be cheap because it was short. Now it’s cheap because it’s long.

Nothing lasts these days except what we throw away.

Parables can often be considered aphorisms in story form. The story has to be very short, of course, in keeping with the first law of the aphorism: It Must Be Brief. But many parables consistently meet this and the other four laws: It Must Be … Definitive, Personal, Philosophical, and Have a Twist. There is a distinguished genealogy of authors who produced parables/aphorisms, as evidenced in the rich parables of the world’s religions. Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, the ancient Jewish sages were all master storytellers and master aphorists. Many Zen koans are parables, and writers like Kierkegaard and Kafka regularly used parables to get their philosophical points across. And so does Steven Carter, whom I first blogged about on July 9, 2008 (alas, a post that has disappeared from my site, most likely due to the catastrophic site failure I described here. If anyone has a live link to this post, please send it along…)

The poor teacher
The lion lay down with the lamb. The lamb said, “Teach me how to be a lion.” The lion devoured him. Then, a muffled voice: “I am waiting.”

The master and the disciple
The disciple: “Thank you, master, for your wisdom.” The master: “True humility is to refuse all compliments. Difficult to do, since the only way to be unworthy of compliments is to return them.”

The polarized King Solomon
What would wisdom seem like in a polarized universe, where plus is minus and black is white? Not so different as you and I might think!
Two women were brought before King Solomon; both lay claim to the same child; each argued eloquently on her own behalf. Solomon listened patiently, then dismissed them, saying they would have his decision the next day. The next day both women appeared, beaming in anticipation of Solomon’s judgment. He said, “It is my decree that both of you shall be cut in half to make one woman, so that the child may have its proper mother.”

The identical bald men
Two identical bald men sit down at table. Pointing to his bald pate, one says, “On me it looks good.” The other agrees, “On you it looks good.” Both are comforted.

The rope
“A poor fellow went to hang himself, but finding by chance a hidden pot containing money, flung away the rope, and went merrily home; but he that had hidden the money, when he found it had been removed by someone, hanged himself with the rope the other man had left behind.”
Don’t hide your money; invest it in the man who manufactures rope.

Like Tim Daly, Drew Byrne is a practitioner of the syllogistic saying. His aphorisms have a whiff of E.M. Cioran around them, something dark and vaguely sinister around the edges. The gathering gloom is alleviated, to some extent, by a kind of bitter paradoxical humor, a final twist that raises what could be a smile or could be a grimace. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell which is which.

We all make mistakes, possibly the first one is being born.

Small people stick together, possibly to encourage each other to be smaller.

He who can still say he is confused, can also say he is getting there.

If you can only look for what your looking for, you will only find what you see.

A river flows under my street. A long time ago, it ran on the surface, when this place was an open field, dotted with ponds. Then, somewhere along the line, the river sank. It was diverted into pipes and submerged beneath roads and homes. We lost track of it. Now we only notice it during heavy rains, when it percolates into people’s basements or bursts its banks and bleeds into the street, turning it once more into a river. The river is still there, even though we don’t see it. It is still fleet, still flowing. And it knows exactly where it’s going.

A version of this abbreviated essay appears in the March issue of Ode.

I first blogged about Tim Daly’s aphorisms back on May 3, 2008. Here are several more sayings, many of which follow an almost mathematical formula characteristic of a certain strain of counter-intuitive aphorism: If X, then Y. Many aphorisms take on this almost syllogistic structure. There is a process of deduction at work in deciphering an aphorism, though that process does not necessarily obey the laws of conventional logic. In fact, aphorists often use this structure precisely to lead readers astray, to prepare them to expect some trite conclusion before slipping in some apposite or unconventional truth, as Tim Daly does here:

Whilst stories cannot die, some are never told.

With great irresponsibility comes great power.

When you find yourself in denial, plant seeds.

Ego: The illusion of being only one person.