Author: James Geary

Last weekend, I did something I have not done in a long time: I hoisted my daughter up onto my shoulders while we were walking through Hampstead Heath. My daughter loved it; she was laughing, bouncing up and down, and really enjoying the view. But I quickly realized why I had not done this in quite some time. My daughter, who is four-and-a-half years old, is just a little bit too big for this kind of thing. And I, at 44, am getting just a little bit too old. It was a big mistake.

The next day, I had a very sore neck and back and am still mostly in pretty excruciating pain. I feel like a whiplash victim without the neck brace: I can barely turn my head without spasms of muscle pain shooting through my left shoulder. The simplest movements—like bending down to tie my shoes or getting in and out of a car—become extremely slow and painful. When I walk, I must look like a Cyberman escaped from the Doctor Who set: carefully erect and totally rigid, I hardly move my head at all. When I turn to look at something, I swivel from the hips so my entire upper body pivots rather than just my neck and head. I am, truly, a pathetic sight.

The experience has given me a scary glimpse into how it must feel to be old, and an even scarier insight into how it must feel to require help in performing the most trivial tasks of daily life. Pain concentrates the mind wonderfully, but only on the things made evident by the pain itself. For example, I never knew how many back muscles are involved in a simple sneeze until I sneezed this morning and ended up writhing in pain on the floor as the left side of my spine seized up. Motions that we normally perform unconsciously—like turning a key in a lock or looking down at the keyboard to type this sentence—are vividly highlighted because they hurt. Who knew such intricate interconnections, such a fine mesh of musculature was behind all these things that I take for granted.

Needless to say, I won’t be hoisting my daughter onto my shoulders again anytime soon. We’re both beyond that now. Sad but true. Hopefully, I’ll still be able to give her piggy-back rides, though, for a little while longer at least. Those are less traumatic from a back pain point of view. After all, she ain’t heavy; she’s my daughter… Theodore Roosevelt advised:

Pray not for lighter burdens but for stronger backs.

Roosevelt had the constitution of an ox. He was shot once while delivering a campaign speech; he finished the speech, the bullet still lodged in his chest. As for me, I’d rather have lighter burdens and a stronger back.

I recently visited an office building that had a sliding board in it. The sliding board, a 29-foot-long strip of white fiberglass that connects the third and fourth floors, is one of those architectural flourishes meant to signify the vivacity and effervescence of a brand. Of course, I wanted to slide down it. But first I had to read the Slide Rules, which basically state that you must use the stairs if you are pregnant, wearing high heels, or under the influence of alcohol. None of these conditions applied to me, so I climbed onto the slide, which is narrow and tubular enough to feel like a miniature Olympic luge course. After a little push, I was off, landing a few seconds later in the marketing department with a pleasant little adrenalin rush.

It’s been along time since I’ve been down a sliding board, and I had forgotten that titillating, vaguely queasy feeling you get in your stomach on the way down. I should have remembered it, though, because my four-and-half-year-old daughter is still very much into slides, calling the sensation caused by the descent a “tickle tummy.” Whenever we’re out in the car, I’m always on the lookout for little humps in the road that could produce the right conditions for the tickle-tummy effect. Country roads are best for this since they are often undulating, especially when the road fords a small stream by means of a little bridge. If I spot a promising hump from far enough away, I accelerate on the approach so we get the little lift-off at the top that generates the desired sensation. It’s a nice, though slightly uncomfortable feeling, a tingling premonition of impending excitement—or danger. As Dutch columnist Toon Verhoeven put it:

Better one butterfly in your stomach than ten in the air.

Irena Karafilly is an author, journalist, and occasional university lecturer who lives in Montreal. Born in the Russian Urals, Karafilly has won Canada’s National Magazine Award (Gold) for Fiction as well as other literary prizes. She holds an M.A. in English from McGill University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She is the author of three books and of numerous short stories. Her most recent book, The Stranger in the Plumed Hat, is a memoir of caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s disease. Karafilly is also an aphorist, and a small sample of her aphorisms follows. More of her aphorisms can be found by clicking here.

The really amazing thing about history is not that it so often repeats itself, but that it fails to bore us.

Falling in love is like falling anywhere. You pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and keep on walking, hoping no one saw you.

The only power you have over people is the ability to do without them.

If human beings were born with a conscience, God would be out of a job.

Eating an artichoke requires a certain amount of optimism.

Speaking of thrones and arses, I had my shoes shined recently. I was in the SF airport. Had to climb up two or three very steep steps to get to what looked and felt uncomfortably like an electric chair. Had a magnificent view from up there, watching the tops of people’s heads as they rushed to or from flights. I felt a little uneasy at such an elevation. Having your shoes shined is one of those experiences that, for me at least, still has overtones of class division and racism; you’re literally putting yourself above your fellow man. Not many social encounters around anymore in which that happens so explicitly.

The man who shined my shoes was a real professional. He applied several different kinds of polish. He used a toothbrush to reach the deep crevasse where the leather of the shoe meets the sole. Then he took two brushes, one in each hand, and start flailing away at my shoe. His arms were swishing back and forth like a windmill, but his aim was true so that the tips of the brushes just skimmed the surface of my shoe. Then he took a cloth and draped it over the shoes and swished that back and forth, sort of like the way you dry your back with a towel by holding it at each end and pulling it back and forth across your skin. After that, he applied a different kind of polish, this one more liquid than the previous paste, and buffed the whole thing up. By the time he finished, my shoes were so bright that I could have read by them at night.

My shoes looked good as new, better than new even, or actually, too good to be true. They were too bright, too shiny. The rest of my apparel couldn’t match the effusiveness of my shoes. I felt like a walking advertisement for the Diderot effect. Remembered Henry David Thoreau’s admonition:

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

In primary school, my favorite scientific experiment was the one in which we were asked to fill a glass of water at home, sprinkle a hefty helping of salt into it, place an ordinary piece of string in the mixture, then leave it overnight. Once all the water evaporated, you were left with a clutch of salt crystals clinging to the string at all kinds of improbable angles. That’s what San Francisco looks like from the pier of the Sausalito ferry: a jumble of white buildings clustered around the thinnest of peninsulas. The prominence of Coit Tower and the TransAmerica building with its sharp pinnacle gives to the whole an oddly crystalline appearance.

San Francisco is unusual, and unusually beautiful, because there are so many vantage points within it from which to see the whole city in panorama. The pier of the Sausalito ferry is just one. The Golden Gate Bridge is another. And Tank Hill is still another, one I had never experienced before despite having lived not far from it for several years. The view from Tank Hill is simply amazing. It’s also amazing that it’s a natural feature. If you’re actually in a city, most aerial views of that city are provided from the tops of tall buildings. In San Francisco, the geography itself is always offering fresh, lofty perspectives. Wherever you are—Nob Hill, the Haight-Ashbury, the Mission—you can find some grassy knoll from which to view the city at a distance while still being right in the middle of it. You get the long view and up close and personal simultaneously. Higher planes, elevated states are always within easy walking distance. You can lift your head into wide open spaces—so high and so wide open that it’s dizzying—while keeping your feet firmly on the ground. Kind of reminds me of Michel de Montaigne’s bracing observation:

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

I saw a billboard the other day with a big picture of Theirry Henry, the French football star, on it. He loomed over the street, arms crossed. He looked cool, aloof, determined. Next to his face were the words: I hate to lose but I am not afraid to fail. I did not notice what Henry was advertising, probably sneakers or mobile phones or credit cards or something. Yes, success comes from welcoming your failures, and your failings. Winners are no better or worse than anybody else, just a lot more persistent. Indeed, it is often defeat that provides the energy for their amazing perseverance. Josh Billings, a 19th century American humorist, was getting at something like this when he wrote:

Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.

And there is another way we are similar to postage stamps: We only recognize our real worth after we’ve been licked.

At a recent appearance at the Falmouth Festival of Literature and Arts, I was asked how you go about writing aphorisms. So I explained the two aphoristic writing methods I had observed: the spontaneous combustion method (inspired impromptu aphorisms scribbled on napkins, receipts or anything else that’s handy, as practiced by aphorists like Stanislaw Jerzy Lec) and the formal composition method (whittling down a much longer piece into one sparkling sentence, as practiced by aphorists like Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld). All the aphorists I have encountered seem to practice one form or the other. But then the woman who asked the question said that she was actually asking how you (i.e. me) write aphorisms. I was a bit surprised by the question since, though I still consider myself an aspiring aphorist, I’ve spent most of my time recently writing about aphorisms rather than writing the aphorisms myself. But yesterday I had a moment of spontaneous combustion and realized a few things about the practice of aphorism composition that might suggest the beginnings of an answer to her question.

I was out running on Hampstead Heath. It was a crisp, early autumn afternoon. The trees were turning orange, the leaves already on the ground puckering up like skin that’s been too long in the bath. The sun was slung low on the horizon. I was running past a group of about five people, all standing in a row next to one another, their hands raised to their brows and squinting into the sun. As I jogged past, the following line came to me:

People tend to salute anything that is unnaturally bright, at least until the shade from their hands reveals what it really is.

As aphorisms go, this isn’t great. It’s a bit flabby, a bit too verbose, but it will serve for the purposes of this anatomy. This was a classic case of spontaneous combustion. The line came to me whole and complete. Apart from tinkering a bit with “shows what it really is” versus “reveals what it really is”, I didn’t revise or edit the sentence at all. (I went with “reveals” because of the internal rhyme with “really”.) I looked at those people and the line appeared. That was it. So the first step in the process of composition was observation: seeing something in the world that I could use as an image. Running past those five people all strung out in a line with their hands to their brows reminded me instantly of a group of soldiers standing at attention, saluting as some officer struts past. It seemed to me a really comical sight. I knew, of course, that they were just shielding their eyes against the low-slung sun to see what was going on in the park, but the military image stuck with me. And that led to the second step in the process: making the link between the image and the moral, psychological or philosophical “lesson” aphorisms contain.

So the second stage of composition involved using the image of those people as a metaphor for some other observation; in this case, a sort of psychological comment on how people tend to react to authority figures. When you’re squinting into the sun, objects can appear larger, more luminous, more impressive than they really are. I remember driving through central Spain years ago and seeing what appeared to be enormous black bulls in the distance. Through the heat waves rising from the highway, these huge silhouettes seemed magnificent and menacing. When we got closer, though, and the glare was gone, they turned out to be just raggedy old billboards in the shape of bulls advertising some kind of Spanish beer or something. The same thing often happens with famous people and authority figures: the spotlights that come with their positions make them seem intensely bright and larger than life. But when you see them in ordinary illumination, shorn of spotlights, they turn out to be far less impressive. So the second stage in the process was: making the metaphor that gives the aphorism its psychological point.

Again, I’m not making any grandiose claims about my little aphorism. It is what it is, a shard of reflected light from a brief moment of observation and inspiration. But it seems to me that this must be what happens when aphorisms are composed. Even those who practice the formal composition method must start with some sudden revelation or insight. And it’s amazing how immediately that observation becomes entwined with language. You see some image in the world and less than a nanosecond later your brain has processed it into some clever little sentence. The observation and the insight seem to arrive together, inextricably linked in the mind. For the aphorist, I think, seeing something and saying something are the same thing.