Aphorisms

Patrick Hunt is an archaeologist, writer, composer, poet, art historian—and damn fine aphorist. Directeor of Stanford’s Alpine Archaeology Project since 1994, he has conducted archaeological research in Peru on Inca sites and on Olmec, Maya and Aztec cultures in Central America. Since 1996, he has led annual teams across at least ten Alpine passes in search of topographic clues to Hannibal’s trek across the Alps in 218 BCE with an army accompanied by elephants. He has a knack for making discoveries: In 1996, he found the 9,000-foot-high quarry for the Temple of Jupiter in the Fenetre de Ferret pass adjacent to the Great St. Bernard Pass, and he directed a team that found a Roman silver coin hoard in the Swiss Alps in 2003. His aphorisms come from several different books, including Faust (1982), Proverbs (1989), and The Laws of Nature(2000):

A clever fool falls headfirst.

God makes wings, man makes chains.

Even stars cast shadows.

The devil will always tell a little truth in order to promote a bigger lie.

Humans have stomachs twice the size of their brains and three times the size of their hearts.

Dogs bark, foxes don’t.

Nature always balances the treasured and the toxic in metal deposition: gold comes with mercury, silver with lead and copper with arsenic.

The tragedy of Beauty is its brevity.

Riding the ski lift up the side of Bald Mountain in Idaho is a pretty exhilarating experience, especially in August when there are no skiers, just the occasional mountain-bikers, with their cycles hung on the lift chairs kind of like the roasted ducks you see in the windows of Chinese restaurants. Below are the steep slopes of the mountain; occasionally, you spot some deer, grazing with lowered heads in the fields like shoppers browsing through the lowest shelves of a used bookstore. At the summit, some 9,000 feet up, the Sawtooth Mountains surround you; the view, and the thinner atmosphere, take your breath away.

My family and I were there to attend the The Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, one of the world’s most amazing literary events. The author talks—by writers including W.S. Merwin, Ted Kooser, Maira Kalman, David Macaulay, Alberto Manguel, Robert Caro, Ethan Canin, and more—were as breathtaking as the landscape. And the conference attendees, who had come from all over the U.S. for five days of workshops and lectures, were equally amazing—completely engaged and utterly engaging. I did a workshop on ‘how to write aphorisms’ as well as an edition of my Juggling Aphorisms show. Here are some of the aphorisms I picked up from participants…

From attendee Rochelle Ginsburg:

Don’t wait to reach the light at the end of the tunnel; light up the tunnel.

From SVWC patron Tom Smith, who picked these up from a friend whose husband originated them:

You don’t get what you expect; you get what you inspect.

If something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

From Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading and The Library at Night:

With the Internet, we have all the facts at our fingertips but we need to know where to put our finger.

Every library has a much, much vaster censored library.

Alberto Manguel also shared an aphorism by Borges:

Writers write what they can; readers read what they want.

From Patrick Hunt, archaeologist and author of Ten Discoveries that Rewrote History:

Even stars cast shadows.

Alberto Manguel also told a wonderful story about someone who found an obscure book in a library and noted that he was the very first person to check it out, even though the book had been in the library’s collection for decades. When he pointed this out to the librarian, the librarian said: “But, of course, sir, we bought it for you.”

Leonid Sukhorukov first fell in love with aphorisms, he says, when he heard them from his father and mother in early childhood. “I noticed even at that time that there was a great shortage of shortness in this world,” he recalls. “Unconsciously, I was drawn to any short, witty and sharp phrase. It was as though it was God given.” A native of Ukraine, Sukhorukov has had a diverse career, working variously as a cybernetics researcher, university professor, composer, and host of Ukraine’s first disco TV show. During Soviet rule, he penned sketches for weekly political satire magazines. He has also served, with pride, as the vice-president of the International Association of Professional Bureaucrats, an organization that skewers bureaucracy in all its forms.

When he was a mere ten years old, he coined his first aphorism:

I shall always believe in immortality … as long as I live!

His parents, of course, immediately wrote it down.

Sukhorukov practices the ’spontaneous combustion’ method of aphorism composition. “Time after time, I have such Heaven-sent flashes, which I try always to note down even on the metro or bus, or during lessons, lectures at the university, and lots of other places.” His cites his aphoristic ancestors as authors like Cicero, Tolstoy, Stendhal, G.K. Chesterton, and Stanislaw Jerzy Lec. “But top of my list,” he says, “will always be the genius of Oscar Wilde.”

Here is a selection of Sukhorukov’s aphorisms, from his most recent book All About Everything and other  publications:

Life’s obstacles are God’s chance to clarify your intentions.

Obstacles create opportunities.

Virtue is the public face of vice.

A mask is prepared to face anything.

Prejudices are habits that have lost track of time.

Worry is fear in a cul-de-sac.

The future tricks us with false hopes, the past with false memories.

Some marriages give bachelors a master’s degree.

In love, we are poets; in marriage, we are philosophers.

No matter how long you teach a fool, he still knows everything.

History can’t be changed but it can easily be re-written.

Democracy opens mouths but does not fill them.

The other day I found a signed copy of Thoughts of Chairman Buffett by Warren Buffett at one of the used bookstalls underneath Waterloo Bridge in London. In the introduction, I learned that if I had invested $10,000 with Mr. Buffett in 1956 my money would have grown to $80,000,000 today. That would be just about enough, I think.

Buffett got an early start in business. As a teenager, he wrote a horse racing tip sheet, and by the time he left high school, in 1947, he had saved $5,000. His mentor in investing was Benjamin Graham, author of the classic The Intelligent Investor. Buffett built his investment business on the principles of that book, the basics of which are: invest only in companies you understand, and invest for the long term. He once averred that the stock market did not exist; “It is there only as a reference to see if anybody is offering to do anything foolish.” When asked once when he planned to retire, he replied: “About five to ten years after I die.” Some of the thoughts of the inestimable chairman:

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls-Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

We’ve done better by avoiding dragons rather than by slaying them.

A great investment opportunity occurs when a marvelous business encounters a onetime huge but solvable problem.

The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.

It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.

Mark Vernon’s book, 42: Deep Thought on Life, the Universe, and Everything, is a collection of essayistic riffs spinning off from 42 different aphorisms. The book’s title is inspired, of course, by the supercomputer Deep Thought in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which comes up with the reply “42? as the answer to, well, everything. Vernon, a writer, broadcaster and journalist, draws his aphorisms from an eclectic range of reading:

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. —James Branch Cabell

They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind. —G.K. Chesterton

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. —J.S. Mill

Vernon takes these words of wisdom and, through his essays, applies them to contemporary life, addressing issues like morality, politics and the environment. The result is a welcome combination of old and new. “The ancients loved aphorisms,” Vernon writes in the introduction. “They believed that although your real aim should be to fill your sails, reason, like a rudder, can steer you in the right direction. Socrates said that wisdom is not like water that can be poured from a jug into a basin. Life’s wisdom is manifest in habits and choices, passions and reflection.”

I first blogged about Joseph F. Conte’s aphorisms back in November of 2007. His most recent collection is Maxims for the Millennium, and in it he continues his aphoristic explorations, mostly in the manner of the great French moralists but with a dash of Karl Kraus-like sardonic humor thrown in. Speaking of Kraus, Conte quotes him to good effect in the introduction: “Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time writing essays.” Enough said. Here are some Maxims for the Millennium:

Everyone can teach something about anything to someone.

Learning never increases for those who do all the talking.

You can kill earnestness with jesting—but not jesting with earnestness.

It is difficult to insult people who do not have self-respect.

The inner ear is a flowerbed inside a blacksmith’s shop. Down below the auditory canal—past the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup—sprout the hair cells of the cochlea, planted in tidy rows along the basilar membrane like geraniums in a window box. As the hammer and anvil pound sound waves into shape, the stirrup taps out the beat on the basilar membrane, which sets the hairs cells swaying like a summer breeze through a cornfield. Each of the hair cells’ undulations fires electrical signals to the brain, where we discern the cause of the commotion—a cymbal crash, for instance, or the soft exhalations of a child breathing. Other senses may rest, but the ear never sleeps. It is insomniac, always alert to the slightest pulses, awake to the faintest tremors. If, as English novelist George Meredith wrote, “Speech is the small change of silence,” then let’s hear it for the ear! A moment of silence, please, followed by three resoundingly soundless cheers.

A version of this abbreviated essay appeared in the July-August issue of Ode , on newsstands now.

Les Coleman (page 28 in Geary’s Guide) has a new book of aphorisms and drawings, Thunks, published by Red Fox Press. As is his wont, Coleman mixes sayings and sketches in the book and, in some respects, his drawings are as aphoristic as his sayings. The cover, for example, bears the image of a barren tree, the trunk of which gradually transforms into a pitchfork, the prongs of which are embedded in the ground. Inside is the drawing of a light bulb that has a crescent moon and stars shining inside it. Coleman’s aphorisms are as paradoxical and dada-istic as ever:

Improvisation: the use of a human skull as a doorstop.

Freedom can land us in jail.

String: a kite’s umbilical cord.

You can be sure that if it is in small print it should be in large print.

Rope: rungless ladder.

In 1991, Irving Weiss and his wife Anne published Reflections on Childhood: A Quotations Dictionary. The book is “a historical collection of observations, opinions, and reminiscences about childhood and children,” the authors write in the preface. It is also a rich, wide-ranging compendium that spotlights the many pleasures and pains of being a child and a parent:

Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength. — Charles Lamb

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of their parents. —Carl Jung

Reflections on Childhood is an enlightening and entertaining collection. Aphorism aficionados are also indebted to Irving Weiss Malcolm de Chazal into English. In 1972, Weiss published Plastic Sense (Sens-Plastique), a translation of a work first published in France in 1948, and which included a preface by W. H. Auden. The book was re-issued with some revisions in 1979. I came across the revised edition in a used bookstore in San Francisco in the mid-1980s and immediately had my socks knocked off by Weiss’s deft translations of De Chazal’s beautiful, beguiling and often downright bizarre aphorisms. I had never heard of De Chazal at the time, and haven’t heard of him since, expect in Auden’s own aphorism anthology, The Faber Book of Aphorisms, where De Chazal is well represented. But that chance encounter with De Chazal in a used bookstore forever altered my thinking about what aphorisms are—and could be. Weiss has recently published a complete edition of De Chazal’s Sens-Plastique, from Green Integer Press.

Now, to regress back to childhood, here are some more poignant pointers fromReflections:

Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man. —Sir Arthur Helps

Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything. —Leopardi

Children always want to look behind mirrors. —Joseph Joubert

A child remains a child until there is another child. — Estonian proverb

The precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face. —D.W. Winnicott

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things. —Norman Douglas

If there is anything that we wish to change in our children we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. —Carl Jung

Well, who woulda thunk it? It is now possible — nay, obligatory — to have your own personal aphorism plastered on a church billboard. Just go to the amazing Church Sign Generator.com, choose from the wide selection of attractive church billboard designs, and type in your sacred or profane aphorism.

You can even have your words of wisdom printed onto key chains, fridge magnets and baseball caps.

I chose as my little sermon a saying from Polish aphorist Wieslaw Brudzinski. Good clean fun for the whole family! Drive on by and be delighted…

My thanks to Max Brockbank of sceneonthe.net for opening my eyes to this site.