Author: James Geary

Why are we always beginning everything all over again? Millions of people already play the violin much better than I do. Millions have already mastered French and Spanish. Millions more already know all there is to know about wine tasting and baseball card collecting.

Following in other people’s footsteps is fine, as long as I’m big enough to fill their shoes. But why start from scratch if all I can ever hope to do is scratch the surface? Because our mistakes make us interesting. Like DNA recombination — each iteration introduces slight inaccuracies, which in turn produce the astounding variation we experience as originality.

“Let no one say that I have said nothing new”, French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal averred. “The arrangement of the material is new. When playing tennis, both players hit the same ball, but one of them places it better.” In the margin for error lies all our room for maneuver.

This essay originally appeared in the July/August isue of Ode Magazine.

Robert D. Dangoor has been in the property business for 30 years, and in the aphorism business for 25. He’s written some 600 aphorisms, contained in eight editions of his book, The Way It Is.

Ten of his sayings were put on the back of sugar sachets and distributed all over the U.K. His aphorisms have been quoted in the U.K. national press, and The Oscar Wilde Society said of him: “Robert Dangoor, like Oscar Wilde, has an uncanny understanding of life and a very skilled way of writing about it.” He’s lived surrounded by books all his life, first as a bookseller, then in publishing, and now as a writer.He’s also written a book of letters, Lifelines.

Mr. Dangoor comes from an Iraqi Jewish background and lives in London. Writing aphorisms “has been like a full time hobby for me,” he says. “I like my aphorisms to be inspirational and make people think about the lighter side of life.” A selection of his sayings:

When you don’t have a friend in the world, befriend yourself.

Don’t ride on your pride.

Better to teach someone who knows nothing than someone who knows everything.

You have to sacrifice something to get everything.

Nothing is free except what comes within you

Mulla Nasrudin is a medieval folk hero who is claimed by many countries, including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. He is part court jester, part Socratic philosopher, and the many tales of his sayings and adventures are still popular throughout the Middle East and parts of Asia. Nasrudin was a Sufi, and the Sufis often use his exploits (chronicled in a series of books by Sufi scholar Idries Shah) much as Zen Buddhists use koans. His stories are also very similar to the longer, more magical tales of the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu. Reading and pondering on Nasrudin’s shenanigans can help break down conventional thinking, and help nurture a breakthrough into wisdom. Mulla Nasrudin’s witty stories are an interesting example of how the parable can intersect with the aphorism.

Parables are not automatically aphorisms. But a parable can contain one or more aphorisms. A parable, taken as a whole, can also be an aphorism, albeit one that pushes the boundaries of the form’s demand for brevity. Most of the parables about Mulla Nasrudin are not aphorisms. Some are just jokes. (Mulla Nasrudin is, for example, one of the early sources for the perennial joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under a lamp-post: Where did you lose them?, his friend asks. At home, the drunk says. Then why are you looking here? The light is better.) Others are short bursts of moral or social satire. But some of these compact anecdotes are pretty good aphorisms, so I thought I’d offer up a couple of them here:

His Imperial Majesty the Shahinshah arrived unexpectedly at the teahouse where Nasrudin had been left in charge. The Emperor called for an omelette. “We shall now continue with the hunt,” he told the Mulla. “So tell me what I owe you.” “For your and your five companions, Sire, the omelettes will be a thousand gold pieces.” The Emperor raised his eyebrows. “Eggs must be very costly here. Are they as scarce as that?” “It is not the eggs that are scarce here, Majesty—it is the visits of kings.”

Nasrudin sometimes took people for trips in his boat. One day a fussy pedagogue hired him to ferry him across a very wide river. As soon as they were afloat, the scholar asked whether it was going to be rough. “Don’t ask me nothing about it,” said Nasrudin. “Have you never studied grammar?” “No,” said the Mulla. “In that case, half your life has been wasted.” The Mulla said nothing. Soon a terrible storm blew up. The Mulla’s crazy cockleshell was filling with water. He leaned over towards his companion. “Have you ever learnt to swim?” “No,” said the pedant. “In that case, schoolmaster, ALL your life is lost, for we are sinking.”

From: The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by Idries Shah. London: Picador, 1973.

Well, it’s official. Prince Harry, second lieutenant in the Blues and Royals regiment and third in line to the throne, won’t be deployed to Iraq. For months, the British Ministry of Defence maintained that the deployment of Harry and his regiment would go ahead as planned. The Prince himself is reported to have insisted that he receive no special treatment, and even threatened to quit the Army unless he was allowed to serve alongside his men.

Now, though, General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the Army, says Harry’s regiment is going to Iraq but the Prince isn’t going with them. Gen. Dannatt was recently in Iraq and, apparently, it’s dangerous there. So he decided it would be best if Harry didn’t go. “There have been a number of specific threats … which relate directly to Prince Harry as an individual,” Gen. Dannatt said. “These threats expose not only him but those around him to a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable.” A spokesman for Harry said the Prince was “very disappointed,” but he wouldn’t be quitting the Army.

What a relief. In a new report, Accepting Realities in Iraq, from the British think tank Chatham House, Gareth Stansfield argues that “Iraq is on the verge of being a failed state which faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation” and “the Iraqi government is … largely irrelevant in terms of ordering social, economic, and political life.” But imagine the headlines if Prince Harry had been deployed there and then ended up getting captured, wounded, or even killed. Iraqi insurgents have claimed recently that they were determined to kidnap the Prince and hold him hostage. What a blow to the war effort that would be! Morale would really hit a low. Instead, it’s much wiser to have all those other British soldiers who are not in line to the throne continue to face the non-specific threats that Gen. Dannatt presumably deems acceptable.

Reactions to Harry’s non-deployment have been mixed. “It would appear that Harry’s life is more valuable than my son or the other nearly 150 service personnel who’ve given their lives,” Reg Keys, whose son was killed in Basra in 2003, told the BBC. On the other hand, Col. Bob Stewart, former U.N. commander in Bosnia, told the BBC News Web site, “It’s logical and proper … when an individual is that targeted the army makes the decision to pull them.”

The Ministry of Defence is pondering other ways to allow Harry to serve his country. There is talk of deploying him to Africa (no failed states there, then!) as part of a United Nations force, or maybe to Afghanistan, where the military would try to insert and extract him without the British media (or the Taliban) finding out. In the meantime, Harry (along with his older brother William) has joined the Blues and Royals’ D Squadron, a group that is never sent to war zones, consisting as it does of wounded soldiers and those whose stint in the military is ending. I wonder if the Ministry of Defence has really though this through, though. Have they, for example, put a plan in place to deal with the inevitable surge in volunteers who, inspired by Harry, want to join D Squadron?

What a dilemma. It really comes down to the question, is it worth putting this young man’s life — any young person’s life — at risk in Iraq? That’s a really tough question. I’m just glad we don’t have this kind of problem in the U.S. We don’t go in for dynasties in the first place, and our leaders would never shirk from doing their duty — whatever the personal risk.

My favorite aphorism about war comes, coincidentally, from a British war-time leader, Winston Churchill:

In time of war, when truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Bill Chapko is an aphorist, and an aphorist computer technician. He’s developed what he calls the Lifetime Uncategorized Computer-Aided Collection of Aphorisms (LUCCA). He says it’s a “place for people who want to write aphorisms” and it can be found here. Mr. Chapko designed LUCCA “to make writing and reading aphorisms as easy and as widespread as possible. It also supports the view that aphorisms are inspirations, caught on the fly, and in general shouldn’t be ‘worked on’ afterwards.” He describes LUCCA, somewhat spookily, as “as an expanded gravestone, where you put your most important words.”

Mr. Chapko is still very much alive and well, though. He’s an American chiropractor living in Italy—and even says my back pain will eventually disappear! He also runs a website called Nietzsche for Creative Spirits, dedicated to that great German bombastic aphorist. Mr. Chapko himself has been writing aphorisms in little notebooks off and on since 1966. His sons have developed the habit, too. Jason, at age 14, came up with:

Death — nobody knows what it is and everyone is going to find out.

Daniel, at age 12, penned:

The sun can never see any shadows.

Here is a selection of Chapko Sr.’s aphorisms; more are available on his website:

Truth is what you see when you wake up.

Don’t confuse sane with same.

Truth is retrograde. The newborn sees best.