Author: James Geary

There is a what for everything?, I hear you ask. An aphorism, I say: a short, witty, philosophical saying. An aphorism for everything, and everything its aphorism; that’s my philosophy. Here are a couple of examples:

When I am shaving in the morning and I behold my rapidly receding hairline—a modest curl rushing towards the crown of my head like some follicular riptide—I think of Jean Cocteau and his quip:

Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.

Or take crowns, for instance. I live in the United Kingdom, where the head of state is a monarch who often wears a crown on festive occasions, which always makes me think of Michel de Montaigne’s great line:

Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say up front that I have a vested interest in aphorisms. I’ve been obsessed by them since I was eight-years-old and have (so far) written two books on the subject. I’m so invested in aphorisms because they have invested so much in me. They are always popping into my head unbidden, and they always bring with them fresh insight or wisdom. Not in some pollyanna-ish way, like “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” or similar feel-goodisms. But in a much more provocative, challenging, and—for me, at least—rewarding way.

My 10-year-old son has been losing a lot of teeth recently. And, coincidentally, so have I. Over the past three months or so, he’s lost about a half dozen “baby teeth” and pocketed some $20 in the process. (The tooth fairy, just still barely in business with my son, is getting hammered by the pound-dollar exchange rate.) Over that same period, I have lost part of one molar (it broke off while I was eating) and had a root canal treatment on another. Total cost to me: some $1,500. I look at my son and see all the ways we are similar and different—we’re both kind of introverted, both of us love to read, but he’s a much better piano player and he makes money on his dental problems while I lose it—and I’m reminded of Magdalena Samozwaniec’s saying:

Age and youth have the same appetites but not the same teeth.

Aphorisms are food for thought—like sushi, they come in small portions that are both delicious and exquisitely formed. And, like sushi, I can never get enough.

This posting originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

On Sept. 11, I blogged about visiting the chateau of La Rochefoucauld in France, recalling how my first glimpse of a chateau-like building in Europe (the stadhuis in Delft) reminded me of Disneyland. My wife read that blog posting and pointed out that it was not me who compared the stadhuis to Disneyland; it was my brother, when he visited us in the Netherlands. And it was not, in fact, the Delft stadhuis that prompted this comparison, but the stadhuis in Gouda. I looked at a picture online and realized she was right: It was definitely Gouda and not Delft that I was thinking of, and so it must have been my brother and not me to whom the Disneyland comparison first occurred.

Memory is a strange, unreliable beast. Physiologically, memories are created and retained by an intricate and ever-shifting net of firing neurons and crackling synapses distributed throughout the brain. Memory is not, as was previously thought, some vast cerebral warehouse filled with rows and rows of neatly ordered filing cabinets. It is rather more like a labyrinth, the twistings and turnings of which rearrange themselves completely each time something is experienced and recalled.

So memories are always shifting around in the brain, being tossed and jostled about like luggage in the luggage compartment of a particularly bumpy train. Reaching into your brain for a memory can be like reaching into the back of your closet for a long-lost shoe. You may have one particular piece of footwear in mind but, because the closet is so messy, you end up pulling out a variety of things (discarded belts, orphaned socks, dust balls of various shapes and sizes) before you alight upon the shoe you wanted to find.

Plus, we all have a tendency to improve our memories with time. That is not to say that we get better at remembering things, but we get better at making the things we “remember” resemble whatever it is we would like to remember at any given time. I, for example, was in need of a nice Disneyland comparison to make a point in the blog entry on La Rochefoucauld’s chateau. It made a much better story if I made the Disneyland remark myself, so in my memory I made it so. My wife has a much more accurate memory then I do; if she had not pointed out my error to me, I would have gone on for the rest of my life thinking that my first thought upon seeing the Delft stadhuis was: “It looks just like Disneyland!” Now, I know that is not so.

As Benjamin Disraeli said:

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

The difficulty is, learning to tell the difference between the two…

When stealing second base, make your upper body evaporate while your lower limbs thin into twin javelins. Commit yourself totally to this risk then run as fast as you can, straight ahead. Don’t look back. Launch yourself into space just as you near the base; the final leg of this journey is a leap of faith. Lean back, hug the earth, hit the dirt like a flat stone skimming the surface of a lake. Sometimes, dissemble. Slide to one side of the bag and hook it with your foot as you pass. Perplexing your opponent is never a mistake. As you fall, throw your arms into the air—time to surrender and say one last prayer. You’ve had your chance and taken it. You’ve left everything behind to find the next safe place, however precarious. The outcome is out of your hands.

Nothing gives life more zest than running for your life

science fiction author Robert Heinlein quipped. Just so, the act of stealing second base makes it wholly your own. No one asks you to give it back. Stand up, brush off the dirt, and look around. You’re already halfway home.

This abbreviated essay originally appeared in the October issue of Ode, on newsstands now.

On the same stressful car trip through France described here, my family and I visited the chateaux of two of the country’s greatest aphorists. First up was the ancestral home of Francois VI, Duke de La Rochefoucauld, near Cognac, and then came the childhood digs of Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, near Saint Malo.

The very first chateau- or castle-like building I ever saw in Europe was the Stadhuis in Delft. As you will see if you click on this picture, it doesn’t look anything like a chateau or a castle, apart from a few architectural flourishes that don’t quite qualify as spires. Still, what did I know? I had never been to Europe before and the building was deeply impressive, in that entirely down-to-earth, non-grandiose Dutch way. To my lasting shame, the first thought that crossed my mind was: “It looks just like Disneyland.” Sad but true, this was the only comparative experience I had had up until that point.

I am less ashamed to admit that “It looks just like Disneyland” was also the first thought that crossed my mind when I laid eyes on La Rochefoucauld’s lair. As you will see if you look at the pictures located here, this place really IS a fairy-tale castle. My daughter loved it, especially the room upstairs where the whole family could dress up in period costumes and flounce about the house. What a beautiful sight it was to see my five-year-old girl run squealing down an exquisitely paneled corridor in a 1,000-year-old chateau with the train of her ball gown twirling in the air behind her. She was being chased, of course, by my two boys, dressed in full medieval armor and brandishing alarmingly realistic swords. As long as they didn’t whack one of those chandeliers by accident… Meanwhile, my wife and I played lord and lady of the manor, swishing down the awesome marble staircase.

La Rochefoucauld aphorism of the day:

We all know how to despise money, but few of us know how to give it away.

In short, this was a marvelous place, even though they made absolutely no fuss whatsoever about being the home of one of the world’s greatest aphorists. They had a couple of nice original portraits hanging in the dining room, but no busts of the great man himself for sale. No calendars, notebooks or bookmarks printed with his cynical sayings. Not even a postcard. Disneyland would have done that, at least, much better…

In comparison, Chateaubriand’s place was, well, depressing. Not so much depressing, I guess, as oppressive. Built several hundred years before La Rochefoucauld’s pad, it is a squat, intimidating and vaguely malevolent structure. Chateaubriand spent about two years there, and hated it. He writes movingly about the gloom of the place, a sensation exacerbated by the fact that his mother was constantly falling into hypochondriacal swoons and his father paced the house in the darkest of moods, insisting on total silence. I can’t find a picture of the chateau—probably just as well—but here are some views of Chateaubriand’s birthplace and grave in nearby Saint Malo.

Chateaubriand aphorism of the day:

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

The house was said to be haunted by the wooden leg of a former resident. Yes, that’s right, just the wooden leg would stomp around at night—accompanied by a black cat, but not accompanied by the rest of the former resident. In the 1800s, during restoration work, the mummified corpse of a cat was indeed found behind a wall (the unfortunate feline can now be viewed under glass in Chateaubriand’s old bedroom), but apparently it was common practice to bury a cat in the wall during the Middle Ages since it was supposed to bring good luck. Chateaubriand had a hideous ink stand made in the shape of the black cat, with big yellow eyes, and this is also still in the house—as is a lovely pen and ink drawing of the man on his deathbed. There was even a gift shop! But they were only selling replicas of that hideous black cat. Walt Disney is no doubt turning in his grave.

What is it about otherwise perfectly lovely children that turns them into horrid, infuriating little monsters as soon as they climb into the backseat of a car for a few hours? Me, my wife and three kids drove a lot through France this summer. We would have had an uninterruptedly great time were it not for the fact that, inevitably, an hour or two into whatever leg of the journey we were making that particular day, the kids in the back would erupt into the most unimaginably annoying bouts of bickering, giggling, and moaning.

My son’s elbow was sticking into my daughter’s ribcage; my daughter’s leg—magically, without her own volition, she insisted—kept landing on her brother’s knee; my other son just would not stop making explosive farting noises. They argued and fought over just about everything. It was too hot. It was too cold. They were hungry. They felt sick. (This last one I thought was just a clever ploy—until my daughter spewed all over the backseat.) It drove us absolutely crazy.

At one point, my wife was in tears. I wasn’t quite sure if the stress was simply getting to her, or if she was realizing for the first time the full horrific nature of the ungrateful, ill-disciplined, behaviorally stunted little bastards she had brought into the world. For my part, I was a raging, screaming lunatic, driven to insane bouts of fury by the incessant squeals, whining, and eructations emanating from behind me. I didn’t recognize myself as I half-turned in the driver’s seat, spittle flying from my mouth, as I shouted at my offspring and swung my left arm wildly in a desperate attempt to smack one of them—any one of them; I didn’t care which. (I kept my eyes firmly on the road the whole time, of course.) Normally, I’m not given to fits of apoplexy, but something about this unruliness—and the open, impudent defiance when we kindly asked the little brats to keep it down a bit—really got to me. I have to say these were the darkest days of my parenthood… so far, at least.

Johann Lavater, the Swiss physiognomist and aphorist, was on to something when he wrote, long before the invention of the automobile:

Three days of uninterrupted company in a vehicle will make you better acquainted with another than one hour’s conversation with him every day for three years.

I guess there are just some aspects of my kids that I’m better off not being acquainted with…

Daniel Liebert grew up in St. Louis in what he describes as “a very verbal Jewish family.” The table talk of his childhood was filled with proverbial expressions and Yiddishisms, echoes of which can be heard in his own aphorisms. “If grandma had a beard, she’d be grandpa,” was an oft-cited explanation for why something happened to be the way that it was. Instead of going to college, Liebert embarked on a Whitmanesque wandering through Europe, Africa and the Middle East, eventually settling in Cairo for several years during the 1970s. He’s been a stand-up comedian and joke-writer; now, he writes poems. Liebert came to aphorisms through humor; he once penned the sayings on bumper stickers and buttons for a living. His most famous line: JESUS IS COMING—LOOK BUSY. As a former stand-up comic, Liebert cites Stanislaw Jerzy Lec as his biggest influence. Lec is “the essential bridge between my comic sense and my philosophy,” he says.

If you like these aphorisms, more of Mr. Liebert’s musings can be found in Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, out on Oct. 2…

Any grail, long sought, becomes a holy grail.

Flour, too, grinds down millstones.

Extreme old age cheapens one’s death.

Nature has laws but no lawyers.

Placebos are highly addictive.

Seeing a play on opening night is like having sex with an hysterical and exhausted virgin.

The poorer we are, the more valuable our money.

The mind is more kitchen than library.

Daniel Liebert grew up in St. Louis in what he describes as “a very verbal Jewish family.” The table talk of his childhood was filled with proverbial expressions and Yiddishisms, echoes of which can be heard in his own aphorisms. “If grandma had a beard, she’d be grandpa,” was an oft-cited explanation for why something happened to be the way that it was. Instead of going to college, Liebert embarked on a Whitmanesque wandering through Europe, Africa and the Middle East, eventually settling in Cairo for several years during the 1970s. He’s been a stand-up comedian and joke-writer; now, he writes poems. Liebert came to aphorisms through humor; he once penned the sayings on bumper stickers and buttons for a living. His most famous line: JESUS IS COMING—LOOK BUSY. As a former stand-up comic, Liebert cites Stanislaw Jerzy Lec as his biggest influence. Lec is “the essential bridge between my comic sense and my philosophy,” he says.

If you like these aphorisms, more of Mr. Liebert’s musings can be found in Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, out on Oct. 2…

Any grail, long sought, becomes a holy grail.

Flour, too, grinds down millstones.

Extreme old age cheapens one’s death.

Nature has laws but no lawyers.

Placebos are highly addictive.

Seeing a play on opening night is like having sex with an hysterical and exhausted virgin.

The poorer we are, the more valuable our money.

The mind is more kitchen than library.

Waiting. It happens so often, so imperceptibly, and in the strangest locations—at elevators and intersections, by bedsides and telephones, in dentists’ offices and train stations. Stop whatever you are doing, even for an instant, and waiting instantly takes its place. It leaks in, like water, to fill up every available space. But waiting is not a passive state. Is a seed waiting before it germinates? Is a bird waiting as it incubates its eggs? These little intervals—between one breath and the next, between a missed opportunity and a second chance—are hard work, periods of intense activity, frantic preparation.

He also serves who only stands and waits

John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost.

What we do while doing nothing cannot be done in haste.

This abbreviated essay originally appeared in the September issue of Ode, on newsstands now.

Entering his ninth decade, Beston Jack Abrams has discovered a new passion; move over jazz, opera and the Chicago Bears, make room for aphorisms!

Mr. Abrams began composing aphorisms about two years ago. After leaving the Army, he graduated from Northwestern University in 1949 and became a pharmaceutical salesman. He retired in 1990, but Mr. Abrams’ idea of retirement consisted of starting his own pharmaceutical trademark company. Nowadays, he helps his wife, Tybie, run her dotcom (devoted to American-made gifts for grandchildren) and he spends several days a month in nursing homes—entertaining residents by playing CDs of the music, and reciting the lyrics, of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cole Porter.

He and his wife “are aghast at the state of our nation, entranced by our grandchildren and grateful for our enduring vitality,” Mr. Abrams writes. “Tybie thinks I am quirky, too studious, sing too many songs for which I’ve forgotten the words, while I think I am endlessly charming. With words we pursue and sometimes capture reality; on with the chase.”

Some glimpses of reality caught in Mr. Abrams’ aphoristic snare:

At the start of an enterprise, risk is invited; as it succeeds, it is avoided.

Solitude is a teacher; loneliness, a terror.

Solitude must be sought; loneliness comes unbidden.

Insult is less hurtful than disregard.

A low IQ is not always essential for an unintelligent act; frequently a high IQ will do nicely as well.

A peaceful life requires a tolerance for contradictions and foreigners.

In comparing the corrupt with the incompetent, choose the former; at least they know what they’re doing.

Complete arrogance is the result of incomplete data.