Aphorisms

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.

The billboards outside churches continue to be popular locations for thoughts for the day, many of which center around the theme of searching (for meaning, perhaps?) and Google.

I posted some of these earlier in God’s Aphorisms and More of God’s Aphorisms but there seems no end to them. To the right is yet another spotted by one eagle-eyed online aphorism scout.

I’ve also received some aphorisms from mere mortals, including this from John Alejandro King, a.k.a. the Covert Comic:

It’s not the illusion of reality that need persist, only the illusion of persistence.

And this, from David Batchelor:

True wisdom is knowing when to compromise your principles.

Strictly speaking, proverbs are not aphorisms. The only difference, really, is that aphorisms have an identifiable author, while proverbs have been around so long that the identity of the author has been lost. Still, proverbs and aphorisms pack so much meaning into so few words by the same mechanism: metaphor. Take the great Chinese proverb:

It’s hard to dismount from a tiger.

How do we know what that saying means? I, for one, have never mounted a tiger, nor have I dismounted one, and I am not inclined to try either operation. Yet I know exactly what this saying means, even though I know nothing about tigers and the saying itself has nothing whatsoever to do with mounting or dismounting actual tigers. I know what this saying means because I know what the metaphor means—getting out of a wild, uncontrollable situation can often be more dangerous than the situation itself.

It took me 16 words to paraphrase the meaning of this proverb, but the proverb itself is only seven words long. Proverbs and aphorisms can be so short, and so meaningful, because the metaphor does all the work. It’s like those foam dinosaurs that come in little capsules; drop one into your child’s (or your own) bath and it unfolds into a good-sized stegosaurus. Drop a metaphor into your stream of consciousness and it expands into manifold meanings. Good, clean fun for the whole family.

Here are some more metaphorical proverbs, taken from W.S. Merwin’s East Window: The Asian Translations.

Burnt tortoise: the pain stays inside.

Rat runs off with a squash holding it by the little end.

The fish line goes out and out but one end is in my hand.

Sleeves touch because they were going to since the world began.

One dog barks at nothing, ten thousands others pass it on.

Chase two hares, both get away.

Stacked like logs in the supermarket, next to the paper towels and the laundry detergent, they await burning. Nestled like eggs, each in its own cardboard box, they clasp tiny brittle buds inside fragile translucent shells. Patient and inconspicuous, these wildest of creatures have been easily domesticated. In homes and offices, they take root on desktops, sprout from bedside tables, thriving in the darkest corners. Hanging from ceilings, they are flowering stalactites—one flick of a switch drives the sap through their veins, through pistil and stamen, and they burst into flame. Then there is no controlling them. They immediately speed away, leaving a trail of fire in their wakes. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, one appears above your head. It glows there in the air for a moment, like some startled bird, before splitting open, spilling its brightness everywhere.

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

The moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived! In fact, it arrived on May 15, when the names of the ten winning aphorists in the German Aphorism Association (DAphA) contest were announced at Germany’s Stadtmuseum Hattingen, home of DAphA. The German aphorism competition is the only one I know of in the world and, though it may sound like an obscure endeavor, this year the jury had to select its favorite aphorisms from more than 1,500 entries penned by more than 300 contributors from all parts of Germany as well as some neighboring countries. That is an astonishing result, and surely makes Hattingen the Cannes of aphorism competitions. For the full story, check out Jurgen Wilbert’s blog on the World Aphorism Association site. For now, here is a selection of the some of the winning sayings (and don’t forget the German Aphorism Association conference from Nov 6–8 in Hattingen):

An aphorist is not stingy with thoughts but with words. —Marita Bagdahn, Bonn

You are working on your weaknesses until they dominate you perfectly. —Helwig Brunner, Graz, Austria

Accidents happen on which the fingerprints of God are still visible. —Nikolaus Cybinski, Lörrach

In a good dialogue, half-truths will not be added together but shared. —Jacques Wirion, Luxemburg

In the long run, no one can live with just one lie; he will certainly need some more. —Wolfgang Mocker, Berlin

Who has not been held up, does not go far. —Frank Rawel, Michendorf